About Dawn of War II

Although the devs/publishers touted a lot about new approach to RTS with the title, the only thing I noticed to be truly new (for the type of RTS DoW2 is) was that your troops couldn't be killed for real. Few units (4 squads total in this case) to somewhat non-linear tactical missions have been done before, although none before in my experience are so lenient on the matter. Your squads can't be killed since only the squad leader is actually important and he can only be knocked unconscious. If all squads become unconscious, emergency evac is pulled and the squads and their leaders are back to full strength as if nothing happened. You lose the turn in the overworld meta-game with a lost battle, but that's hardly anything new. The squad leaders gain experience and level up occasioally, which can be spent on very few areas of interest, and they can be given new equipment which most of the time just makes them more powerful, resilient and generally more efficient.

Each map has several teleport beacons scattered around where squads can be re-inforced, 2 secondary objectives which can be completed, and the primary objective. These are invariably(?) placed at the 4 corners of the tactical map. You can perform multiple attacks on single turn if you perform sufficiently well in a battle, but this is usually unlikely on harder difficulty settings. Each map also holds a boss at the primary objective location who usually has 200 times (and more) as much health as the more regular units from the tougher end. On harder difficulty settings these become rather dreary as you spend most of the time resuscitating unconscious squad leaders and doing round-trips to teleport beacons for re-inforcements than actually fighting the bosses.

In conclusion, the base tactical gameplay is interesting like in any other tactical game, but all value is lost from the fact that you can practically never lose and success in missions is purely based on how well you manage to keep at least one squad conscious long enough to get the others back up, beyond that, all your great tactical plans are pointless except to reduce the number of times you need to get the squads back up.