Zero Game Zone

When Monday Night Combat debuted on Xbox Live Arcade last August, it greeted players with a fairly forgettable introduction. The braying announcer, simplistic action, and limited tutorial didn't paint the whole picture, leaving players to push on and discover the joys of this dynamic and entertaining shooter for themselves. Now available for the PC, Monday Night Combat still begins with the same limp intro, but once again, it soon proves to be a novel and engrossing combat experience. The clever gameplay mechanics that worked so well on the console are in fine form here, and developer Uber Entertainment has made a host of small tweaks that preserve the core action and maintain the balance between character classes. These small changes won't be apparent to most, but the effect will be: Monday Night Combat runs beautifully and feels like a natural fit on the PC. Easy to pick up and packed with a diverse array of satisfying and strategic ways to play, Monday Night Combat is a great new place for shooter fans to flex their itchy trigger fingers.

Monday Night Combat has two core gameplay modes: Blitz and Crossfire. In Blitz, which you can play solo or online with up to three other players, you must defend a shiny disco ball full of money from waves of robot attackers. These greedy bots come in many varieties, and each poses a unique threat, from stout soldiers and bounding gorillas to flying suicide bombers and walking mortar cannons. Killing bots earns you money, which allows you to upgrade your soldier's skills, install defensive turrets at designated locations, and use battlefield hazards to your advantage. Money is also the ultimate tally of your triumph in Blitz mode, and if you successfully defend your money ball, your score gets posted to the online leaderboards. Blitz comes in a few different difficulty levels, and while you can complete the easiest mode by yourself without too much trouble, the tougher ones will strain even experienced teams. Beating these challenges and striving for high scores has some limited appeal, and it's a good way to familiarize yourself with the four different turret varieties; the various soldier-specific skills; and the sharp, responsive controls.

That familiarity comes in handy when you tackle the real attraction in Monday Night Combat: Crossfire. This mode builds on the tower defense-style gameplay of Blitz, challenging you to defend your money ball against waves of hostile robots while earning money, upgrading skills, installing turrets, and the like. The twist is that there is now a team of up to six human soldiers behind those robots. These opposing players are gunning for you, assaulting your defenses, and trying to ensure that those hostile robots do make it to your money ball. Once there, the robots tear down the money ball's shields, making it vulnerable to your human opponents who are trying to destroy it and claim victory. While you are embroiled in this defensive effort, you must also make offensive moves of your own by escorting your friendly robots to the enemy money ball and combating your opponents' defensive efforts. With so many potential objectives on the battlefield, the action is perpetually shifting focus as the two teams struggle to find a way to exploit the enemy's weakness while shoring up their own. This six-on-six struggle is engrossing, and the handful of arenas are designed so that any given area affords different offensive and defensive opportunities at any given moment. It's a hectic, novel twist on objective-based competition.

Crossfire presents a clever challenge, but what makes it truly compelling are the six different soldier classes. Each variety of soldier wields two weapons and an array of skills that allow him or her to contribute to the team in powerful ways. The assault soldier is speedy and tough, best played aggressively thanks to his high-damage assault rifle, remote mines, and ability to fly limited distances. The support soldier, on the other hand, can play a more versatile role; shoring up defenses by repairing turrets and healing allies and then taking the offensive by hacking enemy turrets and calling in mortar strikes. The gunner soldier wields a deadly minigun and an explosive grenade launcher while boasting a room-clearing ground pound and the ability to set himself up as a turret to increase his damage and accuracy. The tank soldier can also make himself into a turret or bull-rush his enemies out of the combat arena, and his fiery jet gun is a great reimagining of the classic flamethrower. The sniper soldier is pretty self-explanatory, but his deployable traps and surprising grapples make him a threat from all ranges. And then there's the assassin soldier, a superquick ninja lady who kills from behind, shoots ricocheting shurikens, and traverses the map with alarming speed.

With so many abilities and weapons at play, it can be tough to know where to start. Monday Night Combat only offers a tutorial for the assault class, leaving you to read up on the others in the "How to Play" section of the pause menu. Furthermore, each class can pay to level up its skills, often adding a powerful bonus where you might expect an incremental improvement. With all this variety and complexity at play, the competitive Crossfire can be a bit daunting at first. Yet with so many ways to contribute on the battlefield, even novice players should have no trouble finding a way to help the team. As your battlefield knowledge increases with each match, you really start to get a handle on the action. Then you can begin to explore the finer points of combat. You might be motivated to work on your assassin-killing strategy after taking one too many stabs to the face. Or you might choose to experiment with optimal placement for the support's sentry turret. Learning the range of the tank's jet flame and the capacity of the gunner's jetpack can increase your effectiveness, as can knowing which class can deploy which type of unique robot. After you get past the initial learning barrier, it becomes immensely satisfying to explore the complexity of each class, finding new and clever ways to thwart your enemies.

You also explore different ways of spending the money you earn. Deciding when to invest in a few turrets or to wait for a powerful but expensive ability upgrade is a tricky proposition that changes with each match you play. There are only five maps available in Crossfire, but each has enough going on in it to prevent you from soon tiring of them, and the lengthy list of dedicated servers ensures you can easily find a match when you want one. As you earn money for participating and doing well in combat, you level up and earn new accolades that you can attach to your name. You can also unlock custom classes that allow you to tweak the attribute bonuses, but not the loadouts, of any class you like. This small degree of persistence is a nice little reward for your efforts and offers just enough customization to mix things up without upsetting the delicate balance of power between classes. Each soldier type can be played in a number of ways, and discovering new strategies and maximizing your battlefield effectiveness is an engrossing challenge. The clever combat design and well-tuned class complexity make this a great online multiplayer class-and-team-based, third-person tower defense shooter. And if that's a bit wordy for you, then just call Monday Night Combat a very addictive and very entertaining game.

Maybe it's not so good to be the king. Monster Kingdom, the third expansion for the real-time king simulation Majesty 2, sees your titular character booted off the throne and sent into exile with just his sidekick for company. Scrambling to get back to power requires cozying up to the creatures that you spent most of your time killing in the previous entries in this franchise, which gives this add-on a different vibe from its predecessors. While the gameplay formula remains focused on managing a fantasy kingdom by decree, everything is freshened up because you can boss around creepy ratmen and liches instead of the heroes of the earlier games. This isn't going to turn around non-fans or spark those who have gotten bored with the series, but the inventive premise and somewhat scaled-down difficulty result in a game that's a step above its lackluster and brutally hard predecessors, and also offers a number of core gameplay enhancements that make the campaign more playable.

Everything should be familiar to veterans of Majesty 2 and its Kingmaker and Battles of Ardania expansions. The heart of the gameplay has been carried over intact to Monster Kingdom. You still play as an anonymous monarch being advised by a toady, and control remains one step removed from you. Although you order up buildings and units like in a typical real-time strategy game, you never have direct control over troops. Instead, you place flags offering rewards to units that explore the map, attack enemy lairs, and defend structures. Offer enough gold as a bounty, and the unwashed masses will leap to your aid. As with the earlier games in the franchise, this is good and bad. Hands-off management makes you feel like a real ruler since you can only motivate subjects to do your bidding. But this also lends the game a certain aloofness because you feel a step removed from the action.

With that said, mechanics have been improved. Units here seem to hop to it faster than they did before, responding more quickly when you plop down flags. They still take their time, and will occasionally ignore vital goals as you jack up the attached reward to the point of depleting the treasury. But the wait never drags out so long that you want to put out an APB. Monsters also seem to be handier when you need them, especially for defense tasks. When your buildings are being demolished by rampaging giant spiders, for instance, defenders are always there to help. Before, your troops often seemed to be goldbricking so much that you started to think they'd gone and joined a union. This alone makes the campaign a more enjoyable romp than those in previous Majesty 2 releases.

Virtually all of the content comes in the new single-player campaign, which is structured similarly to those in the previous Majesty 2 games. You proceed through the saga in linear steps, completing one mission before unlocking the next one. The scenarios play out as a drive to make it back to the throne with the assistance of the monsters that used to be your archenemies. Missions are sort of a Bizarro World version of the usual Majesty 2 shtick, with you fighting to recruit ratmen, goblins, liches, minotaurs, and the like, at times actively reversing the gains made against these beasts in the earlier games. Some of the fantasy atmosphere of this wannabe epic is lost as a barrage of typos appear in almost every text box that pops up on the screen, but the story is more intriguing than the random scuffles slapped together to make up last year's Battles of Ardania.

Much of Monster Kingdom's appeal relies on the cool factor of fielding monsters in place of human, elven, and dwarven warriors, clerics, and mages. The basic structure of gameplay hasn't been altered, however, so you follow the same philosophies as in previous games when constructing guilds, markets, guard towers, bazaars, and so forth. Units are used the same way as well. Troops look different and come with new special abilities, spells, and weapons, but really you're playing the same old game with evil monsters in place of the good guys. So a mage is still a mage, and an archer is still an archer. Switching sides livens everything up, though. Just listening to the new order acknowledgments as well as the random comments from vampire tax collectors as they do their rounds gives the game a whole new vibe.

The frustration factor has also been lessened. Where the two previous add-ons were murderously hard, plopping you down in the midst of umpteen monster lairs that generated waves of skeletons, wolves, and those extremely obnoxious bearmen, Monster Kingdom eases things up a bit, particularly in the first few missions. This is still an extremely tough game, thanks to goodies like indestructible spider-generating garbage heaps on your doorstep and routine destructive flyovers by the likes of level-20 dragons. But it doesn't seem so much like the game is actively cheating you with unfair surprises around every corner. You've at least got a chance to beat a mission the first time through, which leads to much less trial and error. You're more likely to get hooked on the unique kingdom-management gameplay than to throw your mouse across the room, which is a real step forward.

If you're tired of Majesty 2's core gameplay after the original game and its multiple expansions, there probably isn't anything in Monster Kingdom that will revive your interest. But this is still a noticeably better effort than the two previous add-ons, with an innovative campaign, a much more reasonable level of difficulty (particularly in the early stages), and some tweaks to basic mechanics that ease up the sense of frustration that accompanied setting down mission flags in the earlier games. It's definitely worth a look for anyone still up for some hands-off kingdom management.

Sci-fi first-person shooter Bulletstorm is a celebration of adolescent crassness. It is neither artful nor sophisticated, proudly wearing strings of obscenities as a badge of dishonor. Subtle it isn't; entertaining, it is. Where the meatheaded characters and forced, childish dialogue fail, the gameplay mostly succeeds, pushing you through a variety of attractive environments and encouraging you to "kill with skill." In Bulletstorm, you earn points by kicking your enemies into cacti, shooting them in the rear end, and flinging them into the air with your electric leash, among many other variations and combinations of bullets, boots, and exploding barrels. You spend these points on ammo, weapon upgrades, and more, giving you reason to perform these moves beyond the initial gratification they provide. Bulletstorm is sometimes ludicrous and often ludicrously fun--an enjoyable and occasionally embarrassing journey to the profane future it predicts.
The Confederation of Planets' General Sarrano is a product of this future. This potty-mouthed, wholly abhorrent man is part of a secret army called Dead Echo--as was Grayson Hunt, a grunt who discovered that the targets that Sarrano ordered his team to execute were innocent of wrongdoing. Years later, a drunken Grayson, thirsty for revenge, leads his crew of mercenaries into a battle they're ill-prepared to win. Grayson and Sarrano both crash-land on the planet Stygia, where Grayson's quest for vengeance is coupled with his plan to escape. As Grayson, you are accompanied by Ishi, a colleague constantly fighting to control the robotic AI used to patch his brain after he's injured during Grayson's alcohol-fueled rampage.

Ishi is Bulletstorm's best character: conflicted, temperamental, and unpredictable. Nevertheless, praising any of this game's characters is somewhat of a backhanded compliment, given their shallow penchant for describing events, emotions, and each other using four-letter words combined in various nonsensical ways. A few of these bizarre outbreaks of sexual innuendo might be absurd enough to put a momentary grin on your face, but the cringe-worthy dialogue isn't coupled with, say, Duke Nukem 3D's hysterical hypersexual excess, Serious Sam's vibrant surreality, or Vanquish's tongue-in-cheek skewering of modern video game machismo. In fact, Bulletstorm's finest narrative moments are those that leave the trashy talk behind and touch ever-so-briefly on Grayson's guilty conscience, and his attempts to help Ishi conquer the AI infesting his mind. Unfortunately, the verbal sleaze gets tiring quickly and undermines any attempt at serious storytelling. Perhaps developer People Can Fly meant for this dialogue to be so over the top as to be side-splittingly funny. Instead, it comes across as a forced attempt to appeal to our basest instincts.
And so Bulletstorm lacks wit, but it has no shortage of entertaining, in-your-face action. The six-hour campaign is packed with fun shooting made even more enjoyable by the way you earn rewards for being awesome. Your awesomeness begins with the energy leash, which lets you grab foes from afar and yank them toward you. Doing so causes them to helplessly hover in the air for a few seconds as if the laws of time and gravity were temporarily suspended just for that particular enemy. This moment of stasis is your chance to kick screaming masked mercenaries into electric fields, fill their heads with lead, and drop exploding crates onto them. You can slide into them at great speed and knock them off cliffs, use airlocks to send them into the vacuum of space, and feed them to flesh-eating plants. These clever kills are called skillshots and are accompanied by a pop-up proudly proclaiming the name of your move and how many points you earned from it.


Skillshots have such names as "Rear Entry" (a kill involving shooting an enemy in the hindquarters) and "Mercy" (shooting an enemy in the groin and then killing him with a headshot). The immature innuendo thematically ties the gameplay to the narrative, but the fun doesn't come from the titles of the skillshots; it comes from the discovery of new ones and the successful performance of ones you already know. Various environments give you different ways of exterminating Sarrano's cronies, letting you use poisonous pods, swarms of killer flies, and electrified billboards to your advantage. It also gives you a number of excellent and enjoyable weapons to wield, which have specific skillshots attached to them as well. The assault rifle and shotgun are much as you would expect, but a few of these deadly instruments give you intriguing ways of dealing with your screaming foes. The most interesting of these is the flailgun, which fires two grenades linked together by a chain. The chain wraps around your target and immobilizes him, and then you detonate the grenades, annihilating your enemy--and possibly many other enemies in the blast radius. These weapons also have exciting secondary modes. For instance, with the revolver known as the screamer, you can fire a flare into enemies that launches them into the air before exploding and setting fire to nearby grunts.
These elements come together in enjoyable and interesting ways, and when you are surrounded by enemies, the tempo is quick and satisfying. You can slide along the ground and into a foe, which recalls the rocket sliding mechanic in 2010's Vanquish. While that game progressed at a breakneck pace that Bulletstorm never approaches, the similar mechanic here still produces moments of slick energy that culminate in spurts of blood and piercing shrieks. You can exercise crowd control with the leash's Thumper upgrade by slamming your whip down and launching enemies into the air, where they hang for several moments while you fire at them with abandon. There's a lot happening much of the time, with explosions filling the screen, mutants covered with bulbous growths charging at you, and lumbering minibosses demanding your attention. Even so, Bulletstorm makes you feel skillful, for two main reasons. Firstly, a smooth difficulty curve and frequent weapon upgrades allow you to keep up with your increasingly challenging enemies. Secondly, the skillshot notifications serve as a constant reminder of how talented you are. You even earn points for certain mundane actions, such as holding down a mouse button to view a scripted event.
Other aspects of Bulletstorm are more run-of-the-mill. Debris always falls in such a way as to force you down a very linear path, as it so often does in first-person shooters. This linearity is emphasized by the game's wholly contextual jumping. (You can leap over objects only when the game gives you the button prompt.) It can also lead to overcrowded battles in which your companion (or later in the game, two companions) has a tendency to get in your way when you want to perform a particular skillshot, or just stay in control of the action. Bulletstorm's most disappointing moments come near the end, in the form of an easy not-quite-a-boss-fight, followed by a passable shooting sequence that never reaches a proper climax. Then there's the post-credits epilogue, which is so cliched and predictable, it's almost indistinguishable from Killzone 3's own sequel tease.
Fortunately, other missions do a better job of ramping up the excitement. In an early on-rails sequence, you fire a minigun at gyrocopters and speeding carriers--par for the course for many modern shooters, but made thrilling by the gargantuan, menacing wheel of death barreling across your view. Another entertaining mission has you remotely controlling a giant monster in a fun park, just after a shoot-out in a miniature replica city that serves as Bulletstorm's most clever locale. Other attempts to increase the stakes are pleasingly cinematic in their visual excess, but are mostly bark without bite. For example, a battle versus a Venus flytrap with an attitude is nice to watch, but requires almost no skill. After all, a boss has little impact when you don't fear its power. The game's minibosses are standard for sci-fi shooters: shoot the glowing object on the hulk's back, and attack him when he's down. (You might have already fought carbon copies of these bosses in numerous other games.) Your great arsenal gives you enough ways to destroy these muscular freaks to make it fun to take them on. Nevertheless, Bulletstorm is at its best when it sticks to its basic premise, letting you fling your whip around and fire the weapon of your choice, all while you charge through its outstanding environments.

Those inviting environments provide much of Bulletstorm's appeal. Skulking through the dark interior of a space vessel or an industrial warehouse doesn't reveal many visual delights, but the majority of the game takes place on the Stygian surface, which is gorgeous to look at. Under a beautiful blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds, ivy grows across arching overhangs and domed gazebos. In a later level, a dazzling lightning storm makes an intense battle all the more fearful. Most outdoor environments are saturated with greens and blues, which contrasts with some of the grotesque enemy designs, giving this planet the look of a paradise lost. The soundtrack isn't as noteworthy as the art design, though the subtle, satisfying musical cue that ends each battle is an effective pat on the back for another well-fought battle. More notable are the bloodcurdling wails emitted by the savages you exterminate--another way Bulletstorm makes you feel like an unstoppable murder machine.

Finishing the campaign doesn't mean the Bulletstorm experience must come to a close. You can also take part in its lone multiplayer mode, which is fun for a while, but limited in scope. The mode is called Anarchy, and it has you fending off waves of enemies with up to three other players. This is a common cooperative setup (think Horde mode in Gears of War 2, or Halo 3: ODST's Firefight), but the cool weapons and energy leash give Anarchy a dash of flavor. More important to the online experience are the team skillshots, in which players must cooperate to earn the most points. The game often indicates that killing a particular enemy with a specific team skillshot will shower you with extra points, but this requires cooperation. Each round requires the team to earn enough points to pass, and in between rounds, you spend points on new weapons and on upgrades to stats like speed and defense. This reliance on teamwork can be both rewarding and frustrating. On one hand, pulling off a last-minute rally by completing a team skillshot on your final remaining grunt is exciting. On the other, a lone wolf can ruin everything with a single errant shot. If you want the best Anarchy experience, it's best to play with friends rather than strangers, lest you get stuck taking on the same wave time and time again.

Anarchy is fun, but the joy is relatively short-lived. It's enjoyable to kick an enemy into an energy cyclone or over a ledge, but after you do it several dozen times on the disappointingly small maps, it loses its newness, and you will long for more variety. (The repetitive, obscene goading of the announcer doesn't help matters.) You may also encounter some technical troubles. Even on a lightning-fast connection, lag can sometimes be a problem, and on occasion you might be unable to progress to the next round because the game insists that there are more enemies left to kill, though none can be found. Bulletstorm's lasting value comes instead from Echoes mode, in which you repeat short sections of the single-player campaign. This is where you can see how skilled you truly are. Each Echoes map comes with a par time, and you earn points not just for pulling off incredible skillshots, but for doing it as fast as you can. These bite-size levels are addictive, encouraging you to shave off precious seconds and best your previous score, all while chasing friends and strangers on the online leaderboards.
Bulletstorm is a fun, breezy, and puerile romp. If you play games for the fun of it all, this shooter delivers, giving you some neat weapons and mechanics, and rewarding you for your topflight technique. Unspectacular online play, an abundance of shooter cliches, and forced vulgarity keep it from joining the shooter elite. But the creativity of the skillshot system paired with the engrossing nature of moving up the Echoes leaderboards gives Bulletstorm some muscle and will inspire a dedicated following of talented players eager to show off their incredible mastery of its gratifying mechanics.

If there's anything to be learned from sci-fi-drenched tales of time travel, it's that fiddling around with the past and altering key historic events almost always has unintended--and potentially catastrophic--consequences. It's a hallmark of the classic Back to the Future films, and a plot mechanic that's getting a lot of clever play in Telltale's new episodic adventure gaming spin-off of the series. The debut episode set the right tone with a strong story and engaging characters, making up for its gentle puzzles and limited scope. Things get rolling more steadily in Episode II: Get Tannen with its snappier pace, entertaining character developments, and some minor but meaningful tweaks to the formula.

Following a time-traveling romp to Hill Valley's Prohibition era to track down his missing pal Emmet "Doc" Brown in Episode I: It's About Time, Marty McFly finds that his celebration of a job well done at the cliff-hanger conclusion is short-lived. His heroic meddling in the past has the unfortunate side effect of setting events into motion that will erase his existence if he can't find a way to stop them. As the spunky protagonist is starting to fade, he hightails it even further back in time to try to set things right. But what seems like a quick fix to a big problem soon makes the situation even worse, and Marty gets stuck trying to infiltrate and take down a drove of gunslinging mobsters to save himself, his dad, and his future. Like the first episodic installment, Get Tannen features excellent character interactions and a gripping plot that feels faithful to the spirit of the films. It's easy to get sucked into the events that unfold from one time period to the next, and the blend of carryover characters from the last jaunt is beefed up by some colorful newcomers. A love-scorned lounge singer, mullet- and mustache-adorned hooligans, and an impressionable cop with a bit of a drinking problem are just a few new faces that spruce up the tale. Humorous moments abound throughout this episode too, making the few short hours it takes to complete this installment absorbing from start to finish.

Get Tannen plays out across some of the same settings explored in the previous episode, though you also visit a couple of new spots that offer some welcome changes of scenery, like a seedy nightclub that transforms into an "ice-cream parlor" at a moment's notice. Changes in perspective and different camera angles minimize the feeling of deja vu when you're returning to familiar areas like Hill Valley's park and downtown. Beyond making old scenes feel fresh, the way the camera works this time around is a definite improvement. There are still moments when sudden changes in the camera angle during transitions from one area to the next make adjusting your direction in mid-walk a little awkward, but many sections switch things up with dynamic views that shift as you go. Some puzzles feature a static first-person perspective that lets you pan around a scene a full 360 degrees to interact with your surroundings. There are even a few spots where the camera offers a more traditional third-person perspective and moves closely behind Marty as he meanders. This constant shifting blends well with the new areas to explore and keeps the episode from dragging. You never have to stay in one spot for too long, and the time it takes to hike between areas is minimized.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Retribution is the second stand-alone expansion to Dawn of War II, a real-time strategy/tactical role-playing game set in the Warhammer: 40,000 universe. Chaos Rising, the previous stand-alone expansion, required ownership of DOWII if you wanted to play the original's factions in multiplayer. Retribution goes one step further by allowing you to play all six sides in both the single-player and multiplayer portions of the game without owning any of the preceding titles. Keeping everything fantastic from its predecessors and improving upon their flaws, Retribution is a must-have for DOWII fans and a great point of entry for newcomers.

The highlight of Retribution is its campaign, which is set on the long-suffering planets of subsector Aurelia. After decades of warfare and demonic infestation, Aurelia has now been slated for destruction by the Holy Imperial Inquisition. However, the true source of the sector's problems is the corrupt Space Marine Chapter Master Azariah Kyras, and his destruction may stay the Inquisition's hand and spare the sector its fiery doom. While the campaign's story and opening cutscene are decidedly focused on the Space Marines, the five other factions have their own reasons for opposing Kyras (beyond a desire to save Aurelia for themselves). Their motivations generally make sense, but the need for each faction to experience the same basic story arc leads to occasional holes in the plot. An unnecessary case of Eldar on Eldar violence is particularly inexplicable. Less problematic are the simpler narratives of the Orks and Tyranids, who are motivated by, respectively, a desire to obtain an Inquisitor's hat and an instinctual impulse to consume everything in the galaxy.

Regardless of which of the six factions you decide to play as, Retribution's campaign feels like a hybrid of Dawn of War II's campaign, which focused on micromanaging a handful of hero units, and a more traditional RTS. During each mission, you can collect resources to spend on building units or temporarily improving the stats of your heroes. For instance, you can buff up the Imperial Guard Commissar Lord Bernn's health and have him punch tanks to death, or you can field a few tanks of your own. Likewise, when picking mission rewards, you must choose between grabbing better war gear for your heroes and making your army "more killy" by unlocking unit types or upgrades. This can be a tough call because heroes are insanely useful when properly micromanaged, especially if you carefully choose new abilities while leveling up. For instance, you might be able to take out a teeming mass of Orks by slowing down time with one hero while setting the area on fire with another. If you tire of micromanaging heroes and prefer a good old-fashioned tank column, you can leave most of the heroes behind for a mission in exchange for an increased population cap and powerful honor guard units that may be rebuilt or reinforced for free.

Mission objectives are more diverse than in the original Dawn of War II, where you'd repeatedly replay the same maps and where the goals generally consisted of defending power generators or defeating a boss. In Retribution, you play each map only once per campaign, and there is only one optional power generator defense mission. Some of the boss battles in Retribution offer additional variety. For example, in one level, you fight an Ork tank that takes a good 20 minutes to kill with conventional weaponry, but which can be baited into rolling over explosive barrels to its destruction. Other mission highlights include fleeing from a gigantic Baneblade tank, ambushing Ork convoys, and escaping from a planet while an orbital bombardment tears it asunder.

Though the campaign is generally excellent, it suffers from a few bugs that occur almost exclusively while playing as the Imperial Guard, the new side introduced in this expansion. Lord General Castor, the chief hero in the Imperial Guard campaign, is particularly cursed. During the second level, there is a cutscene where a bridge is destroyed, and without fail, Castor's bodyguards get stuck on inaccessible ledges beneath the bridge. Unfortunately, Castor and his bodyguards are considered to be a single squad, so he remains trapped in place until his stranded squadmates perish. Furthermore, using Castor's special ability to air-drop a tank onto the battlefield causes multiple bugs on maps where you normally couldn't build tanks. In one instance, the game wouldn't recognize that the mission objective had been completed; in another, game-pausing messages about a "Fatal Scar Error" popped up constantly. Without these "forbidden tanks," the missions were bug free.

Retribution doesn't add any new multiplayer game types to the mix, but it still offers several improvements that distinguish it from the previous games. The most notable addition is the inclusion of the Imperial Guard faction for the skirmish modes. Basic Imperial Guardsman infantry squads, while fragile, are extremely useful units because they can fix allied vehicles, as well as create their own heavy cover and construct automated turrets. Each of the Guard's hero units can deploy bunkers that, in addition to sheltering troops, may be upgraded to heal nearby vehicles or infantry. Additionally, the bunkers may be booby-trapped, just in case the enemy captures them. While these bonuses make the Imperial Guard excellent at locking down an area, they have also been blessed with awesome tanks like the Baneblade, which is a behemoth adorned with at least a half-dozen turrets. Thus, the Imperial Guard faction is incredibly useful in team games; it's capable of both holding strategic points in the early game and contributing awesome firepower once it's time to crush the enemy under gigantic tank tracks.

Additional improvements to multiplayer include the scuttling of the Games for Windows Live service in favor of Steam alone. Furthermore, all six factions and 30-plus skirmish maps are playable regardless of whether you own DOWII or Chaos Rising, which makes Retribution more enticing for people who skipped the last two games. Also, the Last Stand mode now boasts a new map, as well as a hero unit from the Imperial Guard, but these don't come at the expense of your older characters from Chaos Rising, which can be ported over without any difficulties. Cooperative campaigns have also been improved by allowing both players to build new units during levels and rewarding you with special war gear for helping a friend through the campaign.

Retribution remains as visually stunning as its predecessors. The environments are still largely destructible, and watching your tanks demolish an enemy's cover never gets old. Individual units have excellent animations, and the sight of a Space Marine turning an Ork's head into a fine red paste with a giant warhammer is truly beautiful. However, the maps sometimes get a little repetitive because they have a tendency to be littered with the ruins of destroyed tanks, craters, and burned-out buildings. Maps set on the pristine jungle planet Typhon really stand out in comparison, with its waterfalls, rivers, and lush canopies showing the potential beauty to be found in Retribution.

The excellent production values don't stop with the visuals. While the score and sound effects are generally excellent, it is the voice acting that really shines. Lord General Castor in particular has a wonderfully pompous "Great White Hunter" vibe about him, though that stems from good writing as much as the voice actor. Additionally, the Ork hero, Kaptin Bluddflagg, will define what an Ork pirate sounds like for generations to come. As always, too much "Dakka Dakka Dakka" can be grating on the ears, but it wouldn't be Warhammer 40,000 without it.

Retribution offers a lot of content for its $30 price tag. Each play-through of the campaign takes somewhere between five and 10 hours, which, coupled with multiplayer, makes this a superb value. The ability to play every faction in both multiplayer and the campaign; the high production values and attention to detail; the hilarious characters and spectacular set pieces; the single-player, co-op, and competitive game modes; and Retribution's incredible value all overshadow its few failings. Retribution isn't just a stand-alone expansion; it stands out as the best iteration yet in this series.

The Good

• Orks, Tyranids, Chaos, and Eldar finally playable in a campaign   
• More diverse gameplay than its predecessors   
• The Imperial Guard faction is a great addition.

The Bad

• Some factions' stories are poorly fleshed out   
• Bugs mar the Imperial Guard campaign.