Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

"Do not waste what the Emporer provides!"

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War was a phenomenal game for me, seemingly coming out of nowhere to become one of the highlights of this 1001 list. I've started but not finished the Winter Assault DLC, and there are two more after that, full of new armies to base-build and Zerg-rush across the galaxy to purge the enemy, whomever it may be. That's what it's all about in the far future - war.

Following Dawn of War was Company of Heroes, the Second World War retheme, if you will, though it's much more than that. I've played it twice as much as I've played Dawn of War now, some 32 hours, finishing all the DLC and generally loving everything I was doing.

I like it even more than Dawn of War, but now the Emporer is back with Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, which takes a little of Company of Heroes, rethemes it back into the grim darkness of the far future and then reinvents the gameplay almost entirely to focus even more on your squads and even less on your base building... just stop, I can't wait any longer, let me play already.

Swords & Soldiers

"Oh no, our Meat!"

Can you make an RTS for consoles? Yes, of course you can. It'll just be a little lite to account for having to support inputs from a controller.

Can you make an RTS for the Nintendo Wii? Well, now you're just being silly. That'll be a right pain in the arse to get up and runni-oh, Swords & Soldiers, no, I've not heard of that one at all. Real-Time Strategy, you say? Doesn't look it, but let's see...

Little King's Story

For the King?

Source // Nintendo

We've all been there. We've all dreamed about ruling the world with an iron fist. It'd always be a better place if we were in charge, bossing the citizens around like the little tyrants we are. But we've never quite had a game that gives us that same feeling.

Sure, we can be powerful warriors that might as well be rulers, or command grand armies, and even build entire cities, but nothing captures the daydreams of a young kid quite like Little King's Story, a game described as - brace yourselves - a real-time strategy life simulation role-playing game for the Nintendo Wii.

Give me the crown already.

Halo Wars

"You got Halo in my RTS." "You got RTS in my Halo..."

Source // Xbox

The second Halo spin-off the 1001 list throws our way is a real-time strategy game that aims to work on the consoles as well as Halo made first-person shooters work on them. That is to say, it's going to be dumbed down a little and fiddly to control precisely, but Halo Wars will nonetheless give you an action-packed time as you command the UNSC forces against all-comers from your birds-eye vantage point in the sky.

RTS games can be hit and miss, but I'd be lying if I wasn't looking forward to seeing what this one was about in detail. I'd heard of it, but that was about it. Now it's time to hear some more.

Empire: Total War

"History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time."

This is it, the last chance for a Total War title to impress me, and if the cover is anything to go by, it has a damn good chance. The era of armies lining up in fields and marching towards each other as though war were a noble game is coming to an end. Troops have firearms of their own, artillery is more accurate, and land is no longer the only environment you need to keep on top of.

It is the age of empires, and Empire: Total War puts you in the driving seat of another grand army or two for you to hurl across a field towards your enemy. Have we learned enough to actually know what to do with all these units yet? Will the management sim stuff continue to get in the way?

I hope not, because this is a period of history I'm a little drawn to, and we're about to command our own ships of the line.

Fat Princess

Let them eat cake.

Source // PlayStation

Smaller downloadable titles can give folks the chance to try something that perhaps wouldn't work in a bigger game. They also allow for the adaptation of classic game modes into something more focused or nuanced, fully exploring what it means to capture a flag in a multiplayer team game, for example, like Fat Princess chose to do.

Two teams battle it out in a gory cartoon competition with one goal: rescue their princess from the opposition castle, all while their enemies are making it harder by fattening her up with cake.

Don your caps and grab some cake for what will probably be a silly little game.

Half-Minute Hero

Time goes by, so quickly.

You learn an awful lot over the course of playing far too many videogames, and one of those things is that RPGs are just too dang long. Who wants to grind out levels or hunt down unique trinkets over a long afternoon when you can, instead, crank out entire quests in thirty seconds?

That's the thinking behind the PlayStation Portable title Half-Minute Hero - sort of. It's a little more complicated than that but intriguing enough for me to dive right in and waste no more time.

Spore

Damn nature, you scary.

Games have allowed players to create all kinds of things - simulations of their lives, the cities they want to live in, the vehicles they want to drive, hospitals, theme parks, and zoos. If you had a creative itch, there was probably a game that could scratch it.

But what about creating the entire evolutionary tree of an interstellar lifeform? What game caters for that? What game starts us off in some chemical soup before allowing us to guide the hand of evolution towards a space-faring civilization?

Spore does. Let's see how intelligent this designer is...

Sins of a Solar Empire

Boldly going nowhere.

4X games come in many forms, especially on the tabletop. Exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating comes naturally to humans, whether the backdrop is of the other side of the world or the other end of the galaxy, as is the case in Sins of a Solar Empire.

Dubbed a real-time 4X game, you don't even need to wait around for other players to finish their turns before you can focus on checking off your next X. The galaxy will evolve around you, military factions bombarding defenceless planets, flourishing trade networks linking allies together, and diplomacy serving as your last chance to turn a dire situation around.

Will we survive the vast expanses that lay ahead of us?

Galcon

It's a numbers game.

Galactic battles between hundreds of ships can be presented to a gaming audience in many ways, most of which involve, well, space ships, unloading all kinds of futuristic weaponry through the void towards their target, but unless if you're in an epic EVE Online war, does any galactic battle feel galactic?

And even if you do find yourself in the thick of it in EVE, your computer may struggle to render the view at all. You didn't ask for a photo of a galactic battle, you want to experience one. Ships from multiple planets being flung at a target in, hopefully, overwhelming numbers, but in a readable way.

Enter the cold hard stats and triangular representation of ships in Galcon, a rapid-fire RTS that will not hesitate to fight back.

World in Conflict

War is coming home.

What's the difference between strategy and tactics? Semantics? In video games, there is a difference between the two, which may become apparent in World in Conflict, an alternate history real-time tactics war game marketed and styled like a real-time strategy game.

You won't be base building or mining for resources here. There's just no time. A surprise invasion on American soil needs quick reactions and smart execution of orders as you use your environment as best you can to repel the Russian forces.

How long can your resistance hold out?

Supreme Commander

SuppComm?

A long time ago, this 1001 list had me playing Total Annihilation for the first time, a game I didn't know existed, and one I saw as a hidden gem of the RTS genre - and not because it had big mechs.

Time passes, technology develops, but there'd be no more Total Annihilation until spiritual successor Supreme Commander came along, which is basically the same deal as before: big stompy mechs building and manufacturing the machines of the Infinite War.

Do we have what it takes to end such a vast battle?

GrimGrimoire

Or should that be 'GRiMgRiMoiRe'?

Have you ever thought that what the Real-Time Strategy genre needed most was magical anime girls commanding elves and faeries through the corridors of an ancient castle that's also a magic school, with controls that, due to the nature of the PlayStation 2, result in stripping the 'real-time' part away?

If the answer is yes, I don't know what lead you to want that specifically, but I do know that you can find it in GrimGrimoire. New student Lillet Blan is about to find herself repeating a week of magical battles to uncover the truth about something or other. Probably something important to her, I guess?

I don't really know. I should just hop in and find out.

Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery

Later...

Source // Nintendo

I have never played a game from the Anno series of real-time strategy city-builders, but I do know one thing about them: They're really not suited for the Nintendo DS, right? I mean... you could squash an isometric city-builder into a DS cartridge, but would you really want to? Should you?

The only Anno game the 1001 list wants us to look at is a spin-off for the Nintendo DS, Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery, claimed to be a simpler, more streamlined version, perfect for pockets.

I can't even say that it sounds like a good place to start. Surely we'll be missing out on something. Surely.

Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends

Rise of Eyebrows

Source // Moby Games

When I was on the lookout for these 1001 games in the wild, I would, without fail, go "Oooh, oh, there's one!" Whenever I saw Rise of Nations, before realising that, no, it still wasn't the Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends that I was looking for.

What was this game? An expandalone? A sequel? Something altogether different? I had absolutely no idea for the longest time. And to be honest, I still don't.

A real-time strategy where steampunk technology meets actual magic, Rise of Legends serves as a spin-off to Rise of Nations, so Wikipedia tells me. I wonder why that is...

DEFCON

The only winning move is not to play.

Think 2020 is the year of the shit hitting the fan? Believe it or not, it could be worse. Much worse. You could have me in charge of defences in a global thermonuclear war. How do I know not to have me at the helm? Why a game of DEFCON, of course.

Company of Heroes

Hell has opened its gates.

I didn't know how much I would like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War going into it. I knew it was one of the highlights in the grand list of Warhammer video games, but I didn't know why. I played it, enjoyed it, played it some more, finished it, eventually got around to getting the expansions and am currently working my way through those too. And that's before any talk of sequels, which is just as exciting.

But the grim dark future isn't everybody's cup of tea. Some folks prefer the grim darkness of the past, and it doesn't get much darker than the Second World War. What if an RTS like Dawn of War was set in 1944, with much-improved graphics and new mechanics? Surely I'd be onto another winner.

What say you, Company of Heroes?

Darwinia

Digital evolution when?

The great thing about games is that if you can imagine it, you can make it. Just look at the past few games we've dabbled in. I imagine myself as a tiny little cleaning robot. Boom! Chibi-Robo! I want to drill my enemies in the face. Bam! Drill Dozer. Ok, how about this. I want an RTS set inside a computer. Like a kind of Tron thing. Can we do that?

Darwinia is a real-time strategy game where you defend goofy looking Darwinians against snakey viruses inside a computer simulation of some sort. It's different, to say the least, and I know absolutely nothing about it.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

"Walk softly and carry a big gun."

It has been a great many years since I first encountered Warhammer 40,000, the grimdark tabletop miniature wargame that costs a lot of time and effort before you even begin to play the game itself. Kinda like gathering a bunch of games and a gaming computer for a silly little 1001 list, really.

The setting is so embracing of different alien races and ideologies that it has spawned games dedicated to small skirmishes, to piloting giant mechs, to racing around in demolition derbies. The Black Library contains what must be hundreds of stories for readers of all interests and ages, with seemingly more coming out than you can ever keep up with. And then there are the video games.

Ah, the video games. For an incredible setting that has captured the imagination of a great many fans across multiple mediums already, why is it so tricky for video games to do right? Warhammer video games are always - or at least, always were - OK at best. Entertaining for fans, but could have been so much more. Not phoned in, per se, not half-arsed, but just nowhere near the quality that the setting deserved.

Does Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War serve as an excellent example of that mediocrity, or is it one of the highlights of the many, many attempts at a Warhammer video game? It has been sitting in this Steam library, unplayed, since I got my Steam account. It's time to find out what we've been missing.

Rise of Nations

Whoa, slow down, I'm still hurling spears...

Civilization can seem rather daunting. The entirety of human history (ish) played out turn by turn on large, multicultural maps with different paths to victory. From small beginnings, you explore and expand and flourish on the world stage, before Gandhi goes thermonuclear on you.

Age of Empires, similarly, allows you to grow into the powerhouse you want to be, but in a real-time strategy game that requires you to stay alert and manage all aspects of your empire, or at least the large army you're raising to crush the opposition.

I like the idea of both these games and can see good reasons to play various iterations of each, and others from the genre. But I never quite feel at home in any of them. The learning curves aren't steep, per se, but the time investment in understanding how to do well could be quite a bit.

If I could just find a game that offers both, like Rise of Nations...