Tanks, World of

Do you have any idea, any idea, just how interesting the history of tank combat is? I'll tell you; shit is incredibly interesting. Did you know, for instance, that the differences in Soviet and NATO tank tactics can actually be observed in the design of the tanks themselves? The ruskies favoured aggressive, advancing-under-fire doctrine, and consequently, the tanks are low-profile and manoeuvrable. NATO didn't play that way, oh no. NATO doctrine dictates that you roll up on the crest of a hill, exposing just your turret, depressing the gun and blasting on fools from behind the protection of geography. The extra gun mobility needed by this approach requires a taller turret, giving the vehicle an increased target profile, though one that is ideally hidden in a hull-down position of cover. Ain't that interesting? No? Well, shit. Guess I'll skip the ten thousand word essay on armoured warfare. Fortunately, the knowledge isn't required to enjoy World of Tanks, an interesting free-to-play game from wargaming.net.

It's not easily genre-able, this one. It's probably an action game, firstly- standard battles pitch teams of 15 tanks up against one another on a variety of maps. To succeed in battle, you need to employ some degree of strategy, since it's just a little more complex than your average Black Ops match, though the same could maybe be said of . In addition to the rootin' tootin' shootin' side of things, we have some RPG-style progression out of battle- you buy tanks and upgrades for them with credits earned in battle, and watch your crewmen increase in skill like some kind of militarised Pokémon. An unusual game, then, but a good one? Maybe.

A garage brimming with my totally sweet vehicle selection.

You start off with three frankly heinous little wagons in your garage, one from each of the Russian, American and German lines. After a few battles in these poorly armed, slow, paper-armoured deathboxes, you might have scraped up enough funds and experience to upgrade. In terms of vehicles offered, World of Tanks is certainly impressive- there are five classes of vehicle- agile Light Tanks, versatile Mediums, powerful Heavies, long range SPG (self-propelled gun) artillery wagons and ambush-focused Tank Destroyers, with each nation having intersecting lines for each class in ten tiers of increasing potency. There's a whole lot of historical accuracy here, with tanks from the inter-war period through to the early '50s, though dozens of the tanks available seem to have been prototypes that never saw combat. Nonetheless, the attention to detail is commendable, almost alarming- each tank has realistic options for equipment and meticulously detailed models, including the positions of crewmen and essential parts with regards to incoming fire. I saw a thread on the (well-trafficked) official forums where digital tankers were genuinely digging up blueprints and design documents for these sixty or seventy year old machines to find the ideal spots to place that killing shot.

Into the fray! I took a screenshot before the enemy appeared because I did not wish to put virtual lives at risk.

The progression system is solid. Players spend experience to to unlock new parts for their tank, which also unlocks further research- the classic 'tech tree' approach. There's a lot of depth, here; researching appropriate advancements is vital to keep your tank competitive, and there are a hell of a lot to choose from. Engines, turrets, guns, suspensions and radio units can all be swapped out. Most of the parts available are straight upgrades, but each tank generally has a range of guns available with variations in rate of fire, accuracy and firepower. There is an awful lot of fucking grinding, though, which can prove a real pain. I wanted to get into the Russian Medium tank line, which includes the legendary T-34 series and ultimately the venerable T-54, arguably the first true Main Battle Tank; a delicious prospect, as I'm sure you would agree if you knew what that meant. However, to get even as far as the T-34 (a vehicle without which your sorry ass, reader, might well be speaking German), I had to progress all the way through the light tank line. Light tanks suck man balls, though, and grinding through was a real drag. Because there is so much grinding (this is an MMO, after all), I worry that it would be all too easy to stick a whole lot of man-hours getting locked into a line that isn't as much fun as you thought it'd be. This is reduced a little with recent additions to the tree whereby you can move more easily between classes, but it remains a concern.

The pre-round period is filled with tension, motivational speeches and shit-talking.

The actual gameplay is pretty fun. Two teams of fifteen vehicles line up against one another on about a square kilometre of semi-accurate historical battlefield. To win, a team must either destroy all enemy vehicles (there are no respawns) or capture the enemy base. A lot of work has gone into the combat; intricate mechanics are present for spotting enemy vehicles, shell penetration and tank damage. There's a potent one-more-match mindset the game invites you into, probably because of the one-life system, reminiscent of Counter-Strike. To survive in combat, you must be fairly thoughtful- positioning and movement is key. Speeding out into the open battlefield will almost certainly leave you with thirty tonnes of burnt out paperweight in short order. Unfortunately, some of the tactics are nullified by the relatively compact maps. These play too much into the hands of the heavy tanks; their crazy armour and god-like firepower is quite a bit more helpful than the extra mobility of the light and medium vehicles. It’s not that badly balanced, (though the developers are Russian, so the Soviet tanks have characteristics between ‘exaggerated’ and ‘nightmare death chariot’) and they are working on it, but the issue is present. Another balance issue comes from matchmaking. Since the available tanks range from inter-war experiments to two-hundred ton prototype tracked mountains, there’s a tier system, and you theoretically get matchmade with tanks around your own tier. I think you can end up with too many extreme-tiered tanks; it’s not much fun to play in a team with five tier-fives against one with five tier-eights, but this seems to happen all too often. It’s not crippling, and if you find the wrapping paper of your mid-tier tank torn asunder by the berserk child at the controls of some steel monster, you can just leave the battle and start one in a different tank, but too often I see a tier-four light matchmade with some tier-nine heavies, and pity that fool.

This guys about to taste some hurt. Or he would be if i hadn't got a bloody ricochet.

For a free game, the production values are great- tanks are meticulously modelled, and a whole lot of effort has clearly gone into their recreation. In fact, for a free game, what faults it has are pretty minor. That said, for a free game, there are an awful lot of ways to spend money on it. You can buy a premium subscription, increasing your credit and experience income, premium vehicles if your time is too precious to grind through the trees to get tanks the proper way and premium ammunition to penetrate thicker armour. You start with a (fairly healthy) five garage slots, and more can be purchased for real money, stuff like that. The devs have, I think, struck that difficult freemium balance where paying real money is both worthwhile and non-essential; even the extra-penetrative shells don’t give much ingame advantage since they don’t do more damage than the standard ammo- essentially they just mean you are less hosed against tanks tougher than your own. At higher levels, the income bonus from a premium subscription is the surest way to make any kind of progress, yes, but at no point is it essential, which is very agreeable.

So, if you find yourself with a desire for some WW2 armoured action, but no desire to pay for it, I could not, in good conscience, recommend any game over World of Tanks. Since various goverments and school boards have rejected my calls for the art of tank combat to become a mandatory part of primary education, it might be the only way you can learn this vital skill.

Portal 2 Review

Back again, long after the last post, long after the release of the thing in question, but hopefully not long after my few readers have withered and crumbled to dust awaiting more of my exquisite prose. More video game shit; I don’t know if the few people that I know read this want that or other stuff, but this one’s a biggie. Portal 2- the latest release from industry legend Valve Software- came out, er, embarrassingly long ago, in a time when the Playstation Network was still a thing people talked about as something that worked, and now you get to read my thoughts about it.

Surely everyone knows what Portal is? That first person puzzler bundled in the Orange Box alongside Half Life and Team Fortress as filler, but became a smash hit. You know, the game where the player used a special gun to apply mind and physics bending portals, functioning as tunnels through spacetime to one another, to surfaces and solve increasingly inventive puzzles, set within the bowels of dubious corporation Aperture Science’s enormous research facility. There was that supercomputer, GLaDOS, whose coldly delivered lines were so constantly entertaining, those charming but deadly robotic turrets, that companion cube thing. Yeah, I knew you’d remember. This is the sequel, promising to be a full-length experience to the original’s taster course.

There might be some spoilers, but it’s so damn long since it came out I doubt that bothers you.

Portal 2 begins an indeterminate but seemingly quite long period after the original- Chell, mute, jumpsuit-wearing heroine has, after defeating GLaDOS, been seized by one of the laboratory’s robotic caretakers and placed in long-term stasis; too long, as it turns out. Aperture has been falling apart in the interim without its supercomputer overlord keeping the place neat and tidy, despite the efforts of various other automated personality systems. One such system is Wheatley, a little white sphere with a big blue eye, who awakens Chell on the basis that they could work together to get free of the facility. Voiced by Stephen Merchant, long-time collaborator of Ricky Gervais and all round funnyman, Wheatley busts Chell out of her stasis chamber and the adventure begins.

Wheatley is an amicable, if breathtakingly incompetent, little fellow.

I have to admit, I wasn’t so great a fan of the original Portal. I enjoyed it, sure; it’s a clever little game, but I didn’t go as wild as some of the rest of the world about it. Portal 2 is a big step up as far as I’m concerned, I’m happy to report. The puzzles have retained the entertainment value, a commendable feat, given the considerable novelty value of the original and the sequel’s vastly increased length. The new elements to the puzzle play are all welcome- gravity defying excursion funnels, movable light bridges and motion-inducing gels are all fun and add more depth to the portal-based gameplay. One complaint more professional reviewers than myself noted was that many puzzles had far fewer portal-able surfaces than counterparts in the original, giving a notion that the player was simply carrying out a prescribed solution rather than finding their own. While this is at least partially valid, it seems to me that most of the original game’s puzzles were similar, but just allowed more goofing around. The challenge level could maybe be higher- only a couple took more than a little thought on my part, but I still enjoyed them, and even though this was a far longer game than the original, the core mechanics didn’t get tiresome, a good indicator of their solidity.

While the puzzling was good, to me the real charm of the game came from the storyline. Portal had GLaDOS’s taunting throughout but most of the storyline coming in the last half hour or so, but P2 has brought in a whole lot more. Ellen McLain reprises her role as the icily polite GLaDOS, but she’s joined by some celebrity names in the form of the brilliant Stephen Merchant, playing Wheatley, the venerable J. K. Simmons of J. “PARKER I NEED PICTURES OF SPIDERMAN” Jonah Jameson fame, voicing the charismatic, shoot-from-the-hip CEO of Aperture Science, Cave Johnson, and legend of video-game-voice-acting Nolan North voicing various robots and such like. The presence of such talent shows the extra attention to narrative. Characters are chattering away often, really making them come to life; GLaDOS, understandably upset at having been torn asunder and partially incinerated, is on murderously cutting top form, Wheatley’s general babbling, though sometimes inane, is amusing and endearing. I’d like to give a special nod to the Cave Johnson character- I was genuinely moved (as well as hugely amused) by the voice recordings he’d left behind in an older part of the facility, charting his fall from fame and fortune to bankruptcy, deathly illness, and, worst of all, obscurity. At the risk of sounding like some sort of pretentious literary nerd, there was a distinct Heart of Darkness-y vibe to witnessing the downfall of this brilliant, but ultimately monstrous, individual. Portal 2’s excellent voice acting and inspired writing conspire to make it one of a very few genuinely funny video games.

Aperture's janitorial standards have gone way down in our absence.

The voice actors are only half the story as far as story is concerned, however; Valve, masters of atmospheric storytelling, have included so much detail in the game world itself. In the early stages, chambers are overrun with vegetation, walls fall apart at your approach, and what automated systems persist are on post-apocalypse self-preservation mode; as GLaDOS regains control of the facility, the walls are alive with movement as hundreds of robotic arms try to repair themselves; later, when Wheatley has assumed operational control, the sheer scale of Aperture is revealed as he smashes the facility’s huge movable chambers together in a fairly ghetto attempt to construct functional test chambers. It’s all very clever and very cool, but, honestly, I’d expect nothing less from Valve.

Something totally new to Portal 2 is the cooperative mode- here, two players team up as a pair of portal-gun toting robots for cooperative test chambers. I’ve played this twice, in splitscreen due to the PSN’s continued nonexistence, and it was damn good. While it wouldn’t be unfair to say that some of the original game’s puzzling purity was exchanged for enhanced narrative in the singleplayer, the coop campaign, while noticeably shorter, probably has more puzzling value; while GLaDOS is still present, the story format is far closer to the original’s. We have here a seriously well-designed mode, where the two players must use their four portals together to find a solution. Despite the very streamlined suite of interactions, such as a ping tool to mark out a portal location for a partner and a three-second countdown shown to both players for those timing critical puzzles, some of these are definitely trickier than anything found in the singleplayer. One had my buddy and I totally stumped for almost an hour, and when we finally looked up the solution we, naturally, kicked ourselves- seems to me like that’s good puzzle design. The final chamber in this mode is a masterpiece, the staged design and multiple elements taking a solid but hugely enjoyable bit of work to get through. I’m not normally all that wild for cooperative gaming, being a lone-wolf/anti-social narcissist type, but this was a damn good one.

Portal 2 uses the same Source engine that has been Valve's workhorse since Half-Life 2 way back in 2004, albeit souped all the way up. Despite the almost archaic tech under the hood, the game manages to look good. It's not stunning, but the engine has aged very gracefully, not least due to the constant updates and tweaks Valve has been adding with every new release. The clever art direction definitely contributes to the game's visual appeal- I've always held that a game doesn't need to be a technical powerhouse to be graphically pleasing, and I think Portal 2 proves it.

Complaints with Portal 2 are few and far between. A little extra challenge to some of the puzzles would have been welcome, but it was still no cakewalk. I’ve not felt too compelled to replay, though the presence of heaps of easter eggs and a developers’ commentary will probably tempt me to doing so eventually. In truth, my only real issue is a petty and possibly even irrelevant one; despite being within the setting of Valve’s benchmark Half-Life franchise, Portal 2 includes precious little reference to the overarching events of the HL games. Aside from a nod to the Borealis, Aperture’s mysterious research ship set to be featured in the possibly non-existent Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and a cursory mention of Black Mesa, the shared universe is barely mentioned. I realise criticising a game because it isn’t a different game from a different series really shows the HL fanboy in me, and I can understand Valve’s apparent wish to keep the two series distinct, but come on! It’s been four god-damn years since we had any Half-Life, Valve, throw us a fucking bone. I hope and pray that we see something from the series at next month’s E3, but that’s by the by. Portal 2, standing on its own, is damn good.

You weren't there, man! Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam Review

Another expansion to review. This one's only what, three months old? I'm getting better at this, most definitely. This time, instead of the grim darkness of the far future, we are heading to the jungles of Vietnam, with the aptly, if rather extensively, named DLC for Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Vietnam.

No screenshot utility, I'm afraid, so it's blurrycam time.

My fondness for the original game has already been discussed, and my love of combating communists is no secret, so I was super excited for this expansion, awaiting eagerly its release in December. A week beforehand, however, possibly in protest at being forced to play the abomination that is Black Ops, my PS3 gave up, the disc drive failing and denying me my prize. Now it is repaired, and the first thing I did upon retrieving it was download BFBC2-V. Loading up the base game, I saw the new main menu option and highlighted it. Upon doing so, the whole menu twisted and reshaped itself- the crisp, modernistic aesthetic of Bad Company 2 shifting to a dirtier, brownish theme, the militaristic background music giving way to Creedence Clearwater Revival. This thematic shift is representative of the whole expansion, really- Bad Company 2 was very definitely a modern combat experience, with its homing missiles, optical sights and high-tech vehicles. Vietnam, however, strips this away- in my first match (where I was top player, naturally) I was struck by how crude and brutal the combat was in comparison- without red-dot sights and motion sensors, fighting is done at close range with nothing but rifles and brawn. It's refreshing, in a perverse way, to have this almost rustic style of game, especially in comparison to Call of Duty, where being set in the Cold War instead of near future changed... nothing at all. BFBC2V does it right, though, with '60s style news reports playing over hippy riffs at the loading screens, it feels like a 'Nam game.

The gameplay of the expansion is similarish to the base game- it's still a squad based shooter, with different classes bringing different equipment and abilities to the fray, and an emphasis on vehicles and objectives. The base game's much-vaunted destructible environments feature, but are less prominent. Though this is, I suppose, thematically suitable (and y'all know how much I like stuff that is thematically suitable), with a limit to how much destruction can be done on a map consisting of some flimsy wooden huts and a hill, it would have been nice to see this feature return more prominently- one of my fondest memories of Bad Company 2 was tearing out the back wall of a building with a Black Hawk's minigun, collapsing the whole structure and crushing the enemies and objective within for an extraordinary number of points, but such a thing is not really possible here.

I love the smell of clichés in the blog post.

As you would expect, the equipment available has lapsed to what GIs and Viet-cong would have had access to- you've got your M16s and AK47s as well as the thunderous M60 machine gun and notorious M14 battle rifle. Vehicles have gone back a few numberplates, too, though the tanks and jeeps are really different only aesthetically to their modern counterparts. The new chopper, the UH-1 Iroquois, known affectionately as the Huey and iconic for its extensive service and appearance in limitless 'Nam flicks, has undergone some changes, though. Bad Company 2's Havocs and Apaches were, essentially, winged fortresses of fire and steel, spitting high-explosive death from above, but the Huey lacks the armour and avionics of these beasts. The lighter bird is more maneuverable and feels less clumsy than these, but small arms fire will damage it and heavy machine guns will tear it apart like paper. While its rocket pods and door mounted machine guns pack a punch, the Huey's coolest weapon is the speaker rack- as it swoops over the battlefield these blare out '60s classics, as well as Ride of the Valkyries, which is, frankly, awesome. Lamentably, you rarely hear the whole track, as every NVA regular for several miles will take a pot shot at it. Maybe they want the chopper destroyed; maybe they just really hate '60s music.

I have to say, I have hugely enjoyed my tour in Vietnam. The classic Battlefield gameplay is extremely solid, more so, I think, than people realise; maybe even better than the great Call of Duty leviathan. It's a game that lends itself to fantastic moments- once, on the NVA side, squatting in the bush with a sniper rifle I spied an incoming 4x4 with three GIs about to ford a river into our base. Quickly, I shot the driver- my exquisite marksmanship ensured the shot went right between the eyes- and the vehicle drew to a halt. The passenger, realising what had happened, leaped out and dived into the roadside trees, while the machine gunner fired wildly in the hope of neutralising the threat. Another precision shot brought him low, and a third killed the third American even as he desperately tried to spot me from his partially concealed position. Aside from being a demonstration in my consummate skill, it was a scene straight from a war film, and it felt very, very cool. I have more of these tales- charging wildly towards an endangered objective surrounded by NVA with naught but a shotgun and emerging the victor, smashing a Huey from the sky with a one-in-a-million shot from a tank's main gun- and I'm sure any Battlefield player would too.

I have it on good authority that chicks go wild for aircraft disguised as sharks.

I can't claim to have many complaints, apart from the aforementioned unwieldy title. There are a couple graphical issues, most notably a very noticable pop-in effect with objects far away- when the detail on that chopper suddenly and obviously ramps up as it approaches, it does rather spoil the moment, if not the bastard's aim. Additionally, there are fewer vehicles in this installment. Vehicles were always my favourite part of Battlefield since I am essentially a child, and their relative lack, especially on the NVA side (though crafty commies can redistribute them if they are sneaky), and the complete disappearance of mounted weapons, is a little disappointing. In the final (free) map pack for the base game they brought a map where both sides spawned with a gunship chopper, a transport chopper, two tanks, a couple 4x4s and some quadbikes- there were far more vehicle seats available than players on the map, and it was glorious- no such armoured affray is available. Sure doesn't spoil the game, though- it's a lot of fun, and even my black heart soars each time I strafe the socialists while blasting out Hendrix. While I'm not sure why DICE didn't release this as its own downloadable game in the vein of Battlefield 1943, it's certainly a welcome addition to a franchise that is going from strength to strength.

Chaos Rising, but how high?

Greetings, reader; I trust this fresh solar cycle finds you well. I have come this day to tell you a little something of the expansion to Relic’s grim, dark future strategy-RPG Dawn of War II- an expansion by the name of Chaos Rising. I am fully aware that the expansion is a year old, and that a second expansion is almost upon us, and I have no real excuse for the late date of this. Take solace from the fact that you are getting this at all.

Dawn of War, as you really should know, is a series of strategy games set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, a universe with far more horrors and staunch warriors than hope. It’s a science-fantasy setting, where humanity has spread out among the stars, and discovered that the whole galaxy is full of unpleasantness, the mighty Imperium of Man beset from all sides by daemons, aliens and traitors, and held together by the efforts of the superhuman Space Marines and stalwart Imperial Guard.

I spoke of the original Dawn of War 2 some time ago- I was impressed with the way they handled the universe (a universe of which I am fond), of the clever use of the wealth of lore. I liked the gameplay, too, the player needing to make cunning use of cover and specialised troopers to succeed. I liked the story elements, the Space Marines of the Blood Ravens chapter battling to save their recruiting worlds from the barbaric Orks, the enigmatic Eldar and the all-devouring Tyranids. Recently, and with the assistance of a Steam buddy, I managed to finally complete the single-player campaign of the original game, and so moved on to the expansion, which, perhaps foolishly, I had purchased on release date, on the admittedly shaky basis that my future self would thank me.

The sequel is set a year after the events of the original, your Blood Ravens returning to sub-sector Aurelia to investigate the re-emergence of a planet thought lost to the warp (an alternate reality overlapping ours, dangerous but critical to the setting due to its use in faster-than-light travel) and the apparent distress signal sent from the surface of a world that should be devoid of life. Fairly quickly, the marines discover the presence of the Black Legion, Space Marines who have turned from the light of the Emperor of Mankind and devoted themselves instead to the ruinous powers of the Chaos Gods. It comes to light that there is treachery within the ranks of the Blood Ravens, with traitors in the very command of the chapter and within the player’s force itself.

All this is well and good, but what does it mean for gameplay? Well, the introduction of the Chaos Space Marines means a new faction in single and multi-player games. These are similar to their loyalist brothers, but their millennia of exile brings a few notable differences- they lack some of the new and specialised technology available to loyalists, but their experience and the favour of their patron gods lends them an edge in battle, allowing them to summon daemonic creatures and auras to crush their foes.

The corrupting element of Chaos, an important element to the setting, plays a significant role in the campaign, too. The squads under the player’s command have a new “Corruption Meter”, a sliding scale marking the purity of their souls. Corruption is gained by failing objectives, such as rescuing beleaguered scout marines from foes, or using the new “tainted” wargear, items of weaponry and armour that usually have some sort of dark history, offering spectacular power at the cost of damnation. Your marines can redeem themselves by going above and beyond the call of duty on missions, completing additional objectives like assassinating an enemy commander, or taking “penitent” items that have negative effects on their combat prowess to remind them of their duty to the Emperor. Your Marines get additional abilities based upon their level of corruption, too- totally pure squads might have an enhancement to the use of healing items, those with just a little corruption swapping this for gaining health from the killing of foes, and totally corrupted units go to battle with a daemonic bloodthirst. It’s quite cleverly done, with corruption being just slightly easier to attain than redemption, tempting a struggling player to corrupt his force by degrees. Brilliantly, the total accruement of corruption is used to determine which of the player’s allies turns out to be the traitor betraying the Blood Ravens at every turn, a nifty twist in the storyline.

Terminator armour, lightning claws, personal teleporter and orbital bombardment beacon. Is he underdressed? I wouldn't tell him.

In addition to the modifications to the formula brought by the appearance of a corrupting foe, there are some simple additions made as one would expect from an expansion. The maximum level of characters has been raised from 20 to 30, letting players who had maxed their characters in the original still get a sense of progression. New types of weapons have come, too- marines can now use ‘lightning claws’, bladed gauntlets surrounded with an energy field, deadly to armoured infantry, ‘lascannons’, the setting’s iconic anti-tank weapon, projecting a beam of energy that deals ruinous damage to everything but fires about once a week, and ‘melta’ weapons that spray a short ranged stream of superheated matter to cut through anything you can imagine. These are all fairly nifty additions offering the player a little more tactical choice, which is nice in a game where this is a selling point. There’s a new controllable unit, too- a Librarian marine named Jonah Orion. Marine librarians, like the ones found in libraries, are entrusted with the preservation of knowledge and history. Unlike those, however, these ones are also deadly combatants, destroying enemies with blasts of psychic power rather than just stern looks if they are noisy. Jonah has a broad range of abilities, and as such can be used in a variety of battlefield roles- he can smite foes from afar with the power of his mind, slip through the warp to emerge within the matter of an enemy and engage his terrified squadmates in close combat, or use healing powers and protective barriers to take a more passive, defensive role in proceedings. This unit can be very effective, but does require micromanagement of his range of abilities. Lamentably, I suspect to get the most from the Librarian would require more attention and patience than I am prepared to give him.

Loyalist Predator battletanks form an armoured spearhead to be thrust to the heart of the traitorous foe.

The original game’s missions took place on three planets; a lush jungle world, a harsh desert planet, and an urbanised hive-city planet, with a couple map variants on each to keep the player entertained. With the endless randomly-generated missions, these could get tiresome if the player progressed as slowly as I did. The new game has added a couple of settings, first a frozen ice planet, the base of operations for the Chaos forces. This place plays in a fairly similar fashion to the worlds of the last game, but there are a few nice snow effects and suchlike that give it visual appeal if nothing else. The second of the new settings is awesome, though- a Space Hulk, a huge, drifting space vessel forged from the crushed remains of a number of unfortunate ships that slips semi-randomly through space, often containing secrets, always containing nasties. Drawing inspiration from the tabletop game of the same name, missions on the space hulk have the player driving his force through the maze of narrow corridors against a sneaky and deadly foe. Here, I think Relic has outdone itself. Enemies appear from anywhere, bursting from pipes or leaping from overhead, giving the whole thing a tense atmosphere. Adding to the tension, the warp-tainted nature of hulks imposes a time limit on how long your marines can remain before the corruption has a dangerous effect. There’s a real feeling of pressure on the hulk missions as you hunt through the twisted corridors for the relics you seek- your marines combat tangible horrors at every turn even while they whisper and gibber at those within their mind. It was genuinely unnerving to hear the utterly dependable Tarkus rant about how some imagined thing was his and his alone. Unfortunately, the missions aboard the space hulk are precious few, a real shame given their quality.

Chaos Rising, then, is a worthy expansion to a game I enjoyed. It has made many pleasing additions to an already solid formula. I liked the extra wargear options brought in, the storyline with its betrayal and treachery and the thrilling missions on the space hulk. Things I wasn’t so happy with included the fairly short length of the campaign, though I’m not sure whether that’s better or worse than having a hundred new randomly-generated defend missions each day. Relic did give a slightly broader mission range this time, which is also sweet. All in all, I liked Chaos Rising, and not just as a 40K fanboy, and I await the sequel, Dawn of War 2- Retribution, with eagerness.

Tune in next week/month/time I post to see my thoughts on one or more of: Dead Space 2, Bad Company Vietnam, Gran Turismo 5 and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. I can’t wait, can you!? If you know but one thing, know this- it is gonna be rad.