YouGamers.com

Reviews

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

Detailed Destruction

Dawn of War II uses Relic's Essence Engine 2.0. Previous version of the engine was used to power the Company of Heroes series and while Dawn of War II doesn't offer support for DirectX 10, in other ways the engine has been updated with improved visuals. As in Company of Heroes, buildings and other cover can be destroyed, explosions create craters usable as cover and everything is modeled with attention to detail.

Heavy weapons provide nice explosions and smoke effects.

Mowing down Orks - the amount of detail is impressive.

The engine scales surprisingly well and allows you to adjust a ton of different settings to optimize performance on your system. The overall graphics detail can be adjusted between "Low" and "Ultra".

The super-ugly "Low" mode.	"Medium", playable with the YouGamers Minimum setup.
"High", runs great on the YouGamers recommended setup.	"Ultra" adds some minor detail for high end systems.

In practice, the "Ultra" settings put some serious strain on anything short of a modern system, but Dawn of War does degrade quite gracefully for lower end systems, with the minimum being basically "any Shader Model 3.0 card and a fast single core CPU". The listed publisher's minimum requires you to go for the low mode without any shadows or proper lighting effects, so the YouGamers minimum asks for a dual core CPU and a bit more modern GPU so you can actually play the game without resorting to this ugly mode. The YouGamers recommended system is what you need for high settings and solid framerate and any visual gains from settings higher than "High" are very minor - a nice bonus if you have a fast system, but mostly visible only when looking for specific differences.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Gameplay, CampaignPage 3: Gameplay, MultiplayerPage 4: Visuals and PerformancePage 5: Summary, Scores

Related Stuff

Tags