Review by: William Abner

Really – what is Warhammer without Chaos? In both 40K and Warhammer Fantasy Chaos is the underlying enemy of everything that is good and without it as a driving force, the world shrinks a bit into generic fantasy themes. In short – Chaos is the straw that stirs the drink. Chaos Rising addresses this shortcoming.

Chaos Rising is an ‘expansion’ in every sense of the word. It doesn’t do too much to alter the Dawn of War II experience, and it expands the game by introducing Chaos to the retinue (sans Slannesh) as well as throwing some new units to the previously established races of Orks, Space Marines, Eldar, and Tyranids.

While most veteran players will immediately jump into the game’s finely tuned multiplayer mode and tinker with the new Chaos faction, complete with Plague Marines, Bloodletters, and Sorcerers, others will dive into the new mini-campaign. The story picks up where the original left off – in fact you can import your Force Commander from Dawn of War II into the Chaos Rising campaign assuming you finished it. The plot as well as the writing is actually quite good as the Chaos Black Legion arrives on the scene to decimate the Blood Ravens Chapter and unleash all sorts of Chaos Awesomeness on the countryside. That’s not an ideal situation for the marines to be in so they attempt to put a stop to it and of course that‘s where you and your squad mates come in.

What makes this campaign different, and more entertaining than the original, is the idea of corruption. In the Warhammer universe Chaos corrupts everything – and the Space Marines are no exception and even simply fighting Chaos can rub off on the marines, slowly eating away at their soul. The game models this by adding a corruption meter to each squad leader. If you decide to use a tainted weapon it will add to your corruption; alternatively if you decide to skip a side mission or fail to bring a certain member on a mission it will also add to their corruption. This can have huge gameplay ramifications as the campaign concludes.

The only issue here is that you always know when corruption will happen. There are no real surprises. It would have been nice, and thematically accurate, for a marine to get a taste of corruption without any visual trigger warning you it’s about to happen. Small decisions on the battlefield could trigger this – but as it stands if you want to play the campaign completely corruption free it’s not terribly difficult to do so. In the campaign, ‘breaking bad’ is really your call. Still, corruption adds replay value to the mix as it’s interesting to experiment with various Chaos weapons and to watch the story unfold depending on which marine starts to fall down the dark path.