Been playing a lot of the new Dawn of War 2 expansion, Chaos Rising, recently. And since I have nowhere else to rant, this is where I shall place it.

It's a lot shorter than I expected. At first this seems like a bad thing, but then I remembered the first DOW2. The campaign was long only because of all the extraneous, cookie cutter, repetitive missions that just kept dragging on and on and on and on. All of those have been removed entirely. Every mission feels very unique, and the story has been tightened up a lot compared to the first one. I mean, yeah, it's still basicaly the standard "We are SPESS MEHREENS and we fight for THE EMPRAH" vs "RAAAAH DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPRAH LOL!" with about as much depth as a kiddie pool, but I don't expect much. This is Warhammer 40k - one of the games, no less - I expect something half baked and poorly thought out, shallow, and that gets loads and loads of details wrong, and then I overlook all that because of chainswords. The fact that the story we get actually shows genuine effort on the part of the developers, both in terms of quality and the whole "getting nitpicky details right" that us nerds love so much, speaks quite well for it.

Really, my only gripe is Eliphas. When we first saw him in Dark Crusade, he was a very non-sterotypical Chaos Lord. Rather than screaming and shouting at the top of his lungs, his voice actor had this creepy, silky smooth voice that just oozed a veneer of condescending superiority. He was genuinely intimidating and AWESOME, especially when compared with the other three from the first games who were just frothing lunatics(Bale: SIIIINDRIIII! ; Crull: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! ; Carron: METAL BOXES!). Now though, he's playing the role of Sindri, who also had an awesome voice. Except they're using a different voice actor who is neither of those two, and he makes Eliphas sound pretty awful. They took one of the coolest, baddest motherfuckers who was ever a chaos lord in this series, and turned him into a Starscream character with an annoying fucking voice. In a way, it kind of makes sense... the best explanation as to how he's even alive is that his body was ripped apart after the Kronus campaign, and then his soul was used as currency or something and he was brought back because it suited the chaos gods. That's bound to fuck you up a lot. But still. I think it's a shitty treatment for an awesome villain.

Moving on. During my playthrough, the librarian was pretty much useless, but that's just my opinion. Maybe I'm not using him right or something. I remember, for the longest time when I played Dark Crusade I thought the Tau were useless. But then I learned how to actually play them and they suddenly became quite good. Perhaps it's something similar here.

Multiplayer has been changed a bit as well. Last time I checked, there were only 6 maps, and now there's like 30. So that's good. Also, the Last Stand multiplayer gametype has a Hive Tyrant and Chaos Sorcerer to go along with the Space Marine, Ork Mekboy, and Eldar Farseer. Admittedly, I haven't played much of multiplayer, but that is because even on the internet I am a paranoid shut in who abhors contact with other people.

In other less video game related but still 40k related news, I've actually been working on the chaos temptation comic. I know, right?