Well no one messaged me for these 2, so enjoy lurkers and everyone else:
Decided to snag these both just to try out the series. I've always heard good things about Warhammer 40k, but I've never actually played anything related to it. I didn't buy the bundle because I figured I'd just backlog them forever. But since I make sure to go back and edit in reviews after I grab a code drop, now I'll feel obligated to actually get around to them. Pretty much the only way I was ever going to.
In other words, thanks. I'll edit this to add some thoughts on the games within a day or so when I have the chance to actually play them.
Also, since I feel kind of bad about grabbing two keys at the same time
, here's SpeedRunners Taken.
Dawn of War is pretty good, at least in terms of basic gameplay and stomping around in the tutorial. I don't quite understand all the subtleties, but as far as the core mechanics go, it's one of the rare RTS games that I'd be willing to play more of. Compared to most of the ones that I've tried, it feels more like a war and less like little army men knocking each other over. I think the persistent bodies setting helped a lot with that. About the only thing that could use some work is the camera. I wish you could zoom out maybe 30% more, and I sometimes had trouble getting it to scroll up and down. Really looking forward to trying out the second one after seeing this one.
Dawn of War II... not so much. The camera is better, but the gameplay is worse. I don't like the hero units, and there's either some basic concept that I don't understand or the game is way too slow in terms of resource gathering. There's no tutorial that I could find, the manual doesn't list anything that I hadn't already done, and it's not the same as the first game. I had pretty much the entire map captured and built up except for the enemy base and they were somehow able to send an overwhelming force against me with only the resources from their own base. I think I was probably just getting wrecked by their hero, but if that's the case, I really don't enjoy that style of gameplay. Give me bigger armies of expendable mooks any day. It also plays like a much more tactical game, but that's not really what I'm looking for in an RTS - I'd rather have time to plan in a game that's heavy on tactics.