Dawn of War 2: The Last Stand

So the free DLC for Dawn of War 2 was released at some point this week, I wasn't paying attention though so it took an excited chat message from my brother to draw my attention to this.

I've spent most of the evening playing it because it was that or try and absorb the mornings training my work sent me on. If you want to know what that was like, watch Requiem for a Dream three times in a row.

Anyway, The Last Stand.

The premise is simple, you take three human controlled hero characters- either a Space Marine, an Ork or an Eldar Farseer and pit them against wave after wave of enemies. Your hero levels up as he/she kills, unlocking wargear, special abilities and all the other things we've all grown to love about Dawn of War 2.

Those of us that played the fucking thing have at least.

Anyway, what's it like?

It's pretty fun. A lot of it depends on what your team is like because it gets bastard hard once the 9th wave of enemies comes along. You're originally pelted with waves of lesser orcs, imperial guard, eldar guardians and so on but by the time you reach wave #10 you've got actual space marine squads to deal with and by that point if you're not operating as an efficient three man squad you're going to die. Horribly.

There's one major down side, which everyone and his dog has pointed out: The rounds are fixed. Round 1 is always four squads of orcs, round 2 is always 4 squads of tyranids and so on. I have no idea why the fuck this isn't randomised to prevent the relative boredom of the early rounds.

But whatever, this is free, I shouldn't be complaining. As an add on, it's nothing drastically special. It's good fun and I'll be playing a fair amount of it over the coming weeks, if only to get some decent time in with my Farseer but it's not life changing or anything.

This has led me to think about real game changing DLC though- stuff that *really* added to the gameplay experience.

In my opinion, only the Payload maps for Team Fortress 2 meet this criteria. The terratory control maps are good but the Payload maps shift TF2 from being good fun to being a stone cold classic which is still fun two years after release.

Every other DLC I can think of does nothing but expand the game in very small ways. Even the Far Cry 2 DLC which I consider pretty good by DLC standards only makes very small changes. The only DLC I'd say is worth the money is the downloadable songs for Rock Band but then, I love my drumming...