I have more of an issue with the limitations of the current choices. In DOW I felt they did a great job sticking to the rules of the table top game it was designed after. Everything from the size of your squad to the gear it could carry in most cases matched the table top version. With DOW II this changed, squads sizes are much smaller and the options to gear out the squads are very limited. In addition with DOW you also had more unit choices to choose from, which really varied the strategies one could use when playing and playing against a particular army. It is also easy to see, after playing a handful of multiplayer battles that the armies are not balanced well.

Furthermore, the limited number of maps available in multiplayer is a big disappointment. With the small number available, mixed with the limited units and gear outs, already one can see players mastering the strategies of certain maps. This makes each game fairly redundant, and an extremely unfair annihilation if you are your team is new or you make a single mistake.

The icing on the cake for me however has to be the army painter. While I know that non-Warhammer 40k fans might think the army painter a non issue, the severe step back from the original DOW’s army painter to this new one is tragic. While some people play warhammer for the epic battles many more play it because of the hobby behind it, this hobby ranges from dreaming up new worlds and chapters to hours of painting minute details on a figure the size of your thumb. The army painter brings a bit of those hobby aspects into the computer game, and sets it apart from other games. With DOW II you can no longer upload your own chapter/army badges into the game, nor do you have the flexibly of color placement that you had with the original DOW. Even the number of characters that your army name can have has been reduced.

All in all, while DOW II seems to have a lot of potential it also seems to have taken several steps backwards from the original. It seems that while a lot of thought went into the engine of the game, less was put into those finishing touches that really sets a game apart. One can only hope that with future releases those finishing touches are finally applied.