and I was hoping shambler had played it and would offer his opinions.

go play it shamb and inform me! :D 

Posted from GA thread.
DoW

#5363 posted by Zwiffle [69.210.84.168] on 2004/09/10 16:22:30
Wow this demo got me hooked yo. It's really fun, at least to me, but then again I love RTS games. I'll prolly pick it up on the 21st, or maybe just wait until my birthday in October. Either way it's good.

I was pretty impressed overall. It seems to combine all the good elements of previous RTS games and streamlines it for a very polished product. The design also incorporates many elements from the tabletop game such as unit combat instead of individual soldiers and reinforcing.

Units have both melee and ranged attacks, diversifying how units are best used and the rock-paper-scissors balance. Another nice touch is being able to upgrade your units on the fly to adapt to an enemy's army, and the use of cover.

The resource system promotes cross-map combat, and as far as I can tell from the system is very balanced. Easy to manage, but is still a very vital part of the game (unlike the poor resource design of WarCraft3.)

I really liked it. The design was great. It's basically a combination of everything that worked in past RTSs, from Warcraft to Starcraft to Age of Empires to Rise of Nations, with a nice GW cover on it.

Unfortunately, the demo only allows you to play as the Space Marines in Skirmish, so I can't say how diverse the races are. Supposedly, each race is supposed to be completely different, but I can't say if they really are or if they are just small variations on each other like WarCraft 3. I shall see, I plan on getting it either when it comes out or waiting an extra week and a half to get it for my birthday.

I liked it. 

well... not really, my incomplete objective was to reinforce units. I did that...but it never accepted that I had completed it.

As for my impressions so far... they really captured the war torn space marine cities well.

the unit animations are top notch, and melee combat is just chaos.

Also making pink space marines is just fun :D 

that I absolutely hate RTS games as a genre...

...this might change that 

And the races all seemed to be fairly balanced. That is to say, they all functioned as clones almost. The chaos marines and Orks were slightly better in Melee than the Marines or Eldar, but not overwhelmingly different. There are no sweeping differences between factions (finally, it seems that nowadays developers only want to make them as completely different as humanly possible).

I would have to agree that this is finally the first WH40k game to not suck. Now, the icing on the cake would be a robust scripting system ala Warcraft 3, so that the game develops a modding community. If they do that, this game will totally rock.

I give it a 4/5.