Reaction: Soulstorm (knee-jerk)

Good lord, I heard there were bugs but I had no idea how bad it would be. I'm not a picky gamer - I mean, I'm no hardcore gamer who will nit-pick the tiniest detail. But for Soulstorm, even I saw these problems right away.

After big time successful expansions like Winter Assault and Dark Crusade, you figure you can't really go wrong when you release a new one. It's like sports games - once you have a winning formula, all you really do is tweak the stats a little, throw in a few new features, and you're milking the franchise on the gaming public every year, right?

No! I didn't have time to sit down and go through the main game tonight so I just quickly checked out the skirmish mode. In order to get a good feel for the changes, I decided to play a race I was already familiar with: Imperial Guard. I'm so familiar with them, I even noticed the little tweaks like the Chimera tank now carries only 2 squads instead of 3. But what about those bugs?

For one thing, in my first skirmish, one of my squads got stuck while rounding a corner! Part of the squad went on ahead to their destination, but the rest were sort of in gaming limbo. Somehow the game AI had moved their bodies into an area of the map that was invalid so there they were, trapped for the remainder of the game. And this didn't just happen once - but several times! During the same freaking match!

In fact, collision detection not only sucks, but holy smokes, it's non-existent! I had previously briefly skimmed the complaints all over Relic's Dawn of War forum. Seems everybody by now has noticed the line-of-sight looks weird. Weapons fire not only goes through terrian, but right through units themselves (if a turret is on top of a vehicle, and the target is below, the weapon flare will disappear into the vehicle hull and then emerge underneath). Wow! So hi-tech!

*sigh* On the bright side, Relic is hard at work building the first major patch and hope it'll be available soon (it's been in testing almost a full 2 weeks now, according to their latest updated message). I, for one, can't wait.