Don’t be fooled by the package – Chaos Rising is actually less chaotic than his daddy-o, Dawn of War II. Dressed somewhat nicer than Queen in the “I want to break free” video, this expansion pack dragged its vacuum cleaner all across its predecessor to clean up all the moldy corners. Which means DoW II fans will most likely receive this Child of Chaos with their arms wide open, while those who are still nostalgically crying for bringing back base-building in the Warhammer series will once again have to shyly retreat in a corner and punch the meat bag.

Chaos Rising spices up everything you could have ever liked in Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War II, making sure this time around that it is somewhat gentler with the player’s nerves. Your prayers have been listened to and you can now easily skip the intro movie without having to input Steam console lines. You can also forget having to wait for mission briefings in the co-op mode. But believe me, that’s nothing for your multiplayer buddies, compared to how they had to wait for half an hour for you to finish a single-player mission, because you couldn’t save your progress.

Things are a bit better now, in the sense that you can accept the invitation to a multiplayer match without fearing that you’ll lose everything. You can even go for the fridge, or anything else in real life and this trusty game will keep everything tidy till you return. But it could have been better. For example, you don’t have more than one save slot per campaign and if you fail a mission you’ll have to restart it. These are the rules: Dawn of War II doesn’t do checkpoints.

Born in Chaos…

Chaos Rising excels at combining RPG elements with a twisted story, “tainted” by a thick Warhammer 40.000 lore. Hardly did the Tyranid presence fade, that a new danger can be seen in the horizon: planet Aurelia, thought lost, has suddenly emerged from the anomalies of the Warp and it’s teeming with the demonic forces of Chaos. And it’s up to the Blood Raven Space Marines to find out what went awry. But I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Let’s just say it’s all about betrayal, double betrayal and, if you let things slide in a particular direction, you could even talk of infinite betrayal. Because your decisions will weigh more in the expansion pack than they did in the original campaign.

The first thing that really stands out in Chaos Rising is how natural the continuity between the two campaigns seems. Things may not be as thorough at the narrative level, but it’s essential to note that you can smoothly import your characters from the Tyranid campaign. With the new level cap being set at level 30, you can expect your squads to retain all the abilities and also all the items in their inventory (with the exception of the Terminator armor, which has been rendered useless until a Techmarine can repair it). If instead you choose to start from scratch, you’ll get to spend your ability points to level your squads up to level 17 and will also receive a default war gear.

Nothing to worry about, because you’ll soon realize that everything you carried over from the main campaign is peanuts compared to the most humble drop in Chaos Rising. Once again, the developers made sure we won’t get bored with the variety of the arsenal, which has been enriched with new types of weapons and usable items, some of which can only be obtained by blindly donating to the Librarium. Since I played the game on the highest level of difficulty, I had to repeat some of the missions at least three times to succeed and still, every time the drops were different and just as attractive.

Starting a mission is done similarly to the main campaign, through choosing a destination on the star map after you have decided what squads to deploy. All the six familiar squads are back and they’ll be joined by a highly secret ninja unit whose name I won’t mention because I want to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say that he’s the SF equivalent of the wizard and that his inventory is a bit more flexible than that of the other squads, because it relies both on tomes that unlock new abilities and relics, which improve the existing ones.

Once you land on any of the familiar planets (except the snowy Aurelia, you’ve already been on every one of them) you will reach the conclusion that the Warhammer universe has become a bit more noisy. Faction confrontations are finally full-fledged battles, booming with explosions and visual effects that can paralyze the eye, but never the video card (I must say, the Essence 2.0 engine is pretty scalable).So you no longer have the feeling of a directed wrestling match.

The developers tried to twist the level design a bit, so you can now take more than one path to complete your objectives, even if at times you have the feeling that maps are made just of mirrored halves. You now have a wider range of objectives to tackle with: besides your usual point conquering, bringing down a stubborn Ork and defending a long-forgotten village, you will now have search a Tyranid infected space hulk for relics, or sneak through a camp without being detected. And even your average boss fight is not as average anymore, because said enemy is no longer restricted to its detection area and will follow you across the map, so that you can no longer hit, run and restock to exploit the dumb AI.