Some of us play video games so we can have the stimulation of a reactive adversary, without having to deal with human beings! Now it seems like they are just making every game to be played over the internet. You sell the same number of games if people play multiplayer or alone, so it can't be a money-making issue. All it is going to do is drive us away from video games. By making games that appeal only to the sociable video-gamer, they are alienating the rest of us, and gambling that their social types won't abandon them for something more sociable than anything technology can simulate.

Dawn of War was an excellent game. The same company made Company of Heroes. I have all the expansion packs to both of them. Then they made Dawn of War II, and in an interview claimed they used stuff they learned from CoH in making it. Except it is NOTHING like those games. It should not even be called a RTS game at all! It is fun as far as it goes, but it is completely deceptive. It is basically a much more complicated and annoying 40,000 version of Warhammer Battlemarch. Only the graphics are better in between the battles. Seriously, the "strategy" portion of the campaign has degenerated! And for what? This piece of crap took TEN hours to "update" from the internet once I finally got it all signed up, before I could play, and don't even get me started on the pain in the butt they call Steam. Ten hours to get the thing ready to go, and we get an RTS with no buildings and no army building. It was bad enough when Warcraft 3 went for bigger and more cartoony versions of a cool game, totally destroying the idea that you were commanding or fighting against an ARMY of Orcs, this game essentially has you commanding a beefed-up infantry squad, and they insist on maintaining this fiction that you are fighting for control of a planet. With a four man tactical team, a three man machine gun team, a three man jet pack team, a three man scout team and solo "leader." (WTF do you need him? You have to tell these 'tards every little thing - leader my ass, if leader is better defined as "jerk who goes off and fights on his own" ) Oh, and you can only use four of these five teams at once. So at the most, you have 11 men with which to vie for supremacy of a planet. And it is only a planet because the game tells you so. You could fit all the battlefields in a single town, judging by the scale of the characters to the battlefield. Also, there does not appear to be any sort of option to play another race in single-player mode, and there is no Chaos in it (as an enemy OR faction). That's (in my mind) like leaving the Shadow out of a Wheel of Time game or the Germans and Japanese out of a World War Two game. No one wants to spend the war fighting Italians and Hungarians. According to the instruction manual, they appear to be missing all the best vehicles, too. Imagine now a World War Two game, where you play as the Russians, and can't use the T-34 or Stalin series tanks, or the Germans, and you can't use a Panther or Tiger, or a Japanese naval campaign where you have no access to Zeros or big battleships.

As it is, the game is a squad-level tactical game. It pretends to be a strategy game, but there is no strategy involved, aside from the game occasionally offering you a choice of battlefields. And after beating the field you choose, you have to go play the other one. So really, the only choice you have is what order to play two different battlefields in. And then it will tell you to go to the other planet becase enemies are causing trouble there now. So you have to select the system map, and pick the planet you are flying to (there are two planets on this map, and you are already on one of them). You know you are travelling between parents, because you see a spaceship fly into a purple space vagina in an animation sequence slightly less complex than "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle" and then you are shown a featureless "map" of the planet's surface, with a colored blob intended to represent the sector or province you must protect from 20 or so Space Elves or Space Orcs or Zerg. I mean Tyrannids which are totally not the same thing at all (and they really aren't, because with the Zerg, you got to play their unique building and production system, whereas I am assuming that if you ever get to play as Tyrannids, they are basically functionally identical to the Space Marines, but look different and call the new weaponry they earn "mutations" ). You then chose which four of your five available units you will take on the mission (with no useful information as to which specialists might be best suited to take), guide them across the map, occasionally having to choose which of two capturable buildings on the map to capture on this board, and as you accumulate buildings of a certain type, presumably this offers some benefits, so you have to decide whether you are going to concentrate on taking one type of building or smaller numbers of all three types. To the best of my knowledge, there is no perceptible advantage in having two or three of a certain building type.

This game is really just a glorified shooter with fewer options, where you just tell your guys where to walk and they fight themselves. Sometimes you might tell them to go into a building, or toss a grenade at someone, or bring someone back to life, but that's it.

The only possible superiority or improvements of this game over its predecessor(s) has to lie in multiplayer aspects, or in technical stuff that gets the nerds who designed it all giggly, but takes so much memory and programing and other words that mean "big" or "complicated" in computer-talk, that it detracts from the fun aspects of the game (like where the squads gave you a greater illusion of controlling an army in the old game, but have been thrown out in the newer one in favor of a between-battles version of "Cartoon Soldier Dress-Up Game" ). And the nerds at Relic are giving themselves high-fives because of the way the soldiers wave their guns about while you decide what armor to equip their leader in.

For too long, in my opinion, these games have been trending away from battle games towards minimally interactive story-telling games, that are less about crushing your enemy by employing principles of mass and firepower and resource control and more about jumping through ridiculous hoops are the game designers figure out the best ways they can stretch the parameters of their new masterpiece. I heartily resented the one or two battles per campaign in Warcraft 2 where you had to escort a unit to the magic circle with a small number of irreplacable units but battles like that were practically the rule, rather than the exception in Warcraft 3 (which should have been named "Starcraft in the Middle Ages, But More Silly-Looking With More Emphasis on Empowering A Couple Warriors Than Simulating a Sci-Fi Military Campaign." ) and the genre has been getting worse as it goes on. That was the greatest part of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Soulstorm: you could ignore ALL of that and conquer planet(s). I should have taken a hint when they went from conquering a planet by attacking a surprisingly symetrical continent that was the sum of its land mass with under 1,000 total soldiers in Dark Crusade, to Soulstorm, where more factions fought over fewer total territories now spread over four planets that can be traversed by infantry, and all of which have the same "single populated hemisphere" issue going on. Where an army of 100 or so men is sufficient to occupy a continent. I expected bigger and better from the next generation of the game, and I went from strategy, tactics and army building or management of a single squad from the least-efficient TOE in military history.

As for that storyline the nerds are so proud of that they stripped you of all choice whatsoever to force you to experience it? I've read "We're hiding from a ruthless and evil sorceress by posing as circus folk" portions of WoT with more credibility and more riviting action scenes.

Also, can someone with more background understanding of Warhammer 40,000 explain why the Space Elves are such dicks, and slow-to-learn dicks at that?
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: Mighty Farseer, the humans are approaching and will ruin our highly secret plan, based on our highly secret ancient knowledge.
Female Space Elf: Have my bastard nephew, Fitz, kill them!
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: What?
Female Space Elf: Never mind, he'd just whine about it and fail anyway. We must stop the humans from doing what they are doing! They are a brutish and clumsy race, who lack our wisdom, sophistication and subtlty.
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: How shall we do this?
Female Space Elf: We will harass and attack them without warning or explanation.
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: No explanations? They are brutal stupid humans, after all.
Female Space Elf: Very well, I shall issue cryptic warnings from across the battlefield, in a snotty tone of voice that invites defiance, without actually telling them that their entire army could be destroyed, or that implacable space-evil could be released.
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: That-that's your plan to prevent an unsubtle, brutal and fanatical army to give up? Piss them off and hope they sulk away?
Female Space Elf: That is the wisdom of an (assumed) immortal space wizard. Pretty good, huh?
Anonymous Space Elf Soldier: Is there someone from the military I could talk to? Or even a man? This is two games in a row in which this strategy has failed, and the humans have blundered on, regardless of our subtle hints that they stay away by shooting their men and running away, to foil our plot to contain the threat to both our civilizations before they knew of the threat. We seem to be dwindling race, so why dosen't your gender stick to making babies, rather than picking fights using ineffective tactics?

Wow, that was a lot of bile. I hope this game gets more fun soon.