

However, other abilities and items will be blocked from use as your marines lose their usual zealotry for their Emperor-god.

Doing so opens up a whole raft of powerful new abilities, the best of which let you summon demons and hypnotise enemy units. It's the corrupting influence of the Chaos gods that's afoot, and decisions made during your missions (often the easy choices to success) will send individual squad members incrementally down the path of corruption. Great stuff, but just more of the same until a few missions in, when you realise all is not quite right with your team. Level up your abilities (the level cap is now moved to 30) and repeat. Use your heavy weapons to lay down covering fire, advance on targets with your tactical squad, and disrupt packed enemies with jump-pack equipped assault troops. Select a team based on mission intelligence and tool them up appropriately, before cautiously annihilating the enemy. It's great to see this classic Warhammer foe again, complete with spiky armour and threats of eternal damnation, but initially the gameplay seems a tad too familiar. Once again the sector is threatened by various nasties, with the main protagonists being the new Chaos Space Marines. Your battle hardened Space Marines return, and continue, somehow, to overcome their stereotyped roles to inject some real character into their post-mission banter. The RTS action takes off just after the climax of the first game. This standalone expansion to the excellent Dawn of War 2 (DOW2) can be played without the first instalment, though we certainly wouldn't recommend it.
