I want your opinions on the game and I want to know if its worth buying or not, bearing in mind that RTS is not my favourite genre atm.
It's in that sentence that I'd take pause.
Looking at the single player game:
DoW2 is an interesting take on RTS without base building. There's some possibility for dropping some turrets and mines into the battlefield, and there's a need to capture points on the map that allow you to reinforce your squads and occasionally other points too depending on the map/mission. But you drop up to four squads into a mission and then you complete that mission with just those squads; no base building, no tech-tree escalation, just a raw combat and mission completion focus.
Eurogamer expressed concern over this and felt that an RTS without base building was, really, just a bit too shallow. I usually agree with them but, in DoW2's case, I disagree quite firmly.
Through the SP game, your squads gain experience down four tracks: effectively health, firepower, melee and energy, the latter of which powers their special abilities. You choose what kit they take and this directly affects their effectiveness in this particular mission. And you have more than four squads, each with a different focus to it, but can only take four on a mission so there are different possible ways of approaching a mission. This mixture allows for easier and harder ways to push through a mission. In fact, the only one I've lost thus far was because I screwed up and failed to take any anti-vehicle weaponry on a mission versus Eldar with a bunch of vehicles...
That's not to say that it's necessarily easy, though, but through careful management (on the "standard" difficulty) you can usually make it through a mission even if it takes you 45-50 minutes to do it. Most missions I'm done in 20-25 minutes or less.
This makes it a good game to pick up and play for a mission and then go do something else, if you're busy (like I am). Or you can play a bunch of missions back to back.
Speaking of a bunch of missions: if you've played Dark Crusade then you may remember the strategic map and how areas persisted such that if you played in a set of highlands then when you went back there it was the same highlands and even had a bunch of your kit still on it. That was interesting but also rather crap all at the same time. DoW2 has thrown that implementation away but come back with something vaguely similar in smell but much more about giving you options as to what kind of mission you fancy playing next. Want a base defence mission? There's sure to be one around. How about a combat drop into extremely hostile territory? Yep, there's them too. And other variants besides. It's that flexibility that makes it interesting and easy to turn to my particular interests right now. There's also story going on and an overall mission to complete so it's not as if all missions are born equal; it's just that you might choose to do a certain time limited mission before it expires rather than press on with the "main" story line.
It has the Company of Heroes cover and terrain destruction, though tweaked a bit to allow for a lot more melee units and jump packs and so on. But this isn't CoH. It's also not DoW1, as the tighter focus on a small number of squads (in the single player) gives a much more personal feel. You give a crap if your Tactical Marines go down, both because that's a quarter of your fighting force and because you've been fighting alongside this squad for around fifteen missions and there's a subtle attachment to them.
In a big sense, this is the furthest they've been from the tabletop war game and I feel that DoW2 is the stronger for it. Gone is the mass of troops swarming everywhere; that mechanic works if you're a hardcore RTS player or if you're playing turn-based (which is the basic mechanic for a tabletop war game). However, in RTS, tight focus is a good thing, especially if you're not Piacular (chosen for his uber-abilities in CoH).
But ultimately this game is still an RTS. You point your units and hope they do the right sort of thing. You sometimes have a tiny bit of trouble selecting your guys from in the midst of a Tyranid swarm (though the number keys help). With the best will in the world, your guys sometimes go the "wrong" way because you told them to go a long distance and they wandered into fire, not around it. It's certainly no worse than any other RTS for these things and, given the tight focus, often better. But it's still an RTS.
I'm really enjoying the single player campaign and I enjoyed the multi player during the beta. If you were me, you'd buy it. You aren't me, of course...
