izigame.me

What should have been a really good DLC is severely let down by developers who either overshot their funding or severely lacked imagination.
Dreadnought: Cool idea, well implemented, when you actually get to use him. Which is the problem, when you actually get to use him. Your access to the dreadnought is so limited that it is a real toss up as to whether it is worth spending the scarce resources to upgrade it. I've seen the developers give a disingenuous answer to someone else's review, basically saying you get to use it a lot. This is bordering on an outright lie. When the game spawns new missions, one of them will allow the dreadnought, so technically you could do dreadnought missions on every round. But the reality is that this is far from possible, due to the combination of distance to travel, quality of rewards on offer and proximity of other missions. Sometimes the dreadnought mission will literally be impossible to reach, but more often it is just not worth the effort because the RNG (that thing the devs were eager to tell us this game avoided) means that the better rewards are elsewhere.
Several of the set piece missions of this expansion also forbid you bringing the dreadnought. lol wut? Yeah, you couldn't make it up. Missions introduced in the expansion about the dreadnought, that don't let you take the dreadnought.
The other new squad member is the techmarine. This one is allowed in every mission, but have no fear that he will break game balance, as this guy is quite underpowered. His direct attacks are weak, which makes a certain degree of sense since he's all about managing servitors. However, the servitors are underwhelming to say the least. Firstly, their AI is atrocious. They will run straight through overwatch arcs, environmental hazards and enemy zones of control like they aren't there. It isn't like they just follow exactly where the marine they are following goes though, no, it is worse than that. IT would have been so basic to just make them avoid hazards when following, but either through lack of attention to detail or some kind of masochism, the devs decided not to do this. If that was the only issue with servitors it would be passable, but they also do super underwhelming damage. When a bolter does 3 damage, a storm bolter does 4 damage and a tier 1 frag grenade does 3 damage, a tier 1 servitors plasma cannon does 3 damage. A servitors tier 1 multi-melta does 2 damage in support fire mode, exactly the same but with less range as a basic storm bolter firing in the same mode.
You can increase this damage through buffs etc, but that costs additional actions, so basically the servitors can slightly edge out the damage a techmarine can do with his bolter, but only slightly, and only in optimal situations, which obviously take a lot more effort to engineer than just running up and shooting someone in the face.
While that is irritating, my bigger issue is the RNG, which is massively expanded in this DLC. The frigate introduced in this DLC to allow you to deal with additional missions? Yeah it is in it's entirety an RNG, that is literally all it is, with no indicator as to your chances and no opportunity to influence them. My first thought was, well that's just lazy. Though on reflection I expect its an issue of either going over budget and having to cut stuff, or the devs just being really unimaginative. They knew this would be a really unpopular move, because they have surely seen the responses to the other RNG events that have been around since launch, yet they did it anyway, so you have to ask why. Lack of money seems like the most likely reason.
I've enjoyed elements of this DLC, and playing through the campaign with this DLC is marginally more interesting than without it. But not £12.99 more interesting. If you can't get it on a steep sale, then my recommendation would be to steer well clear. Which is why I'm not recommending, because it just isn't worth the asking price. In a steep sale, like 50%+ off I'd give it a shot. The saddest thing is that it wouldn't have taken much to make this an outright recommend, but the sum of all the deficiencies add up to a huge amount of wasted potential.