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Have you ever played ‘comp stomp?’ When I want to arrange an RTS playdate with a mix of casual and hardcore friends with wide gaps in skill level, it’s the only way to play without someone (or perhaps everyone except the guy who can time his build order) getting smoked. Load into a map against a bunch of AI opponents, form an alliance with your buds, and proceed to mercilessly gang up on the bots. There’s just one problem with comp stomp: it usually sucks.
It can be fun to mow down crummy AI here and there, but it’s the equivalent of getting a bunch of people together for a baseball game and then deciding, well, let’s actually go to the batting cages instead and all practice our swing next to each other. RTS bots tend to either try and fail to mimic a decent human player or cheat out the wazoo, and if there’s no real contest, no threat big or clever enough to push me into genuine improvisation and panic, I’m hardly playing an RTS at all.
Enter Dawn of War 2’s The Last Stand, a decidedly Warhammer 40,000 answer to comp stomp. It might be an apocalyptic hell-future where everyone in the universe hates each other, but when you’re down to a single measly commander unit and surrounded on all sides by waves of souped-up aliens, there’s no time to be choosy about allies.
Where to play
In 2011, the popular mode was spun off as The Last Standalone on Steam, but that version is no longer available. The best way to play it now is via Dawn of War 2: Anniversary Edition, a 2024 re-release that includes all the original’s expansions.
It’s RTS by way of Killing Floor: take cover, work together, kill ’em all. If everyone on your team dies, it’s over.
The Last Stand retains the chill vibes of comp stomp because of its cooperative setup, but it’s hard enough that everyone in a lobby has to rely on one another. The first few waves are breezy, small packs of jobber orks and tyranids, but soon the game starts chucking much heftier units at you: artillery, infantry with grenades and rockets, and anti-everything monsters and bosses. The sort of stuff you can’t kill with just one unit.
With enough kiting and clever use of whatever active abilities you’ve brought with you, getting through all 20 waves is a doable, lengthy challenge. But the game does not make it easy, and that’s the best part—rather than ape strategies a real player might use, The Last Stand opts for the blunt force approach. The game tries to crush you in an avalanche of hopeless odds, with one wave going so far as to pit you against exact copies of your own characters, retaining the ability to revive each other and use whatever gear you’ve collected against you.
It’s careful to extend a hand both to novices, who can get a feel for the game without having to worry about juggling several squads or managing the macro aspect that just becomes noise in a rushed PvP match, and to experts, for whom it becomes a de facto arcade mode. Score multipliers stack up based on how long you all go without dying, how many control points you’re able to hold at once, and how quickly you best each wave. At first it’s a struggle just to see the end, and as you improve, it becomes a race to get there as efficiently as possible.
Where some casual RTS modes try to relieve the tension by making it certain you and your friends will win, Dawn of War 2 does it by making it likely you and your friends will lose, at least until you’ve taken your licks. That sort of punishment is exactly what I come to Warhammer adaptations to drink deep of; it’s the grim darkness of the far future! I don’t want the privilege of an even fight, I want to be beset on all sides, drowning in horrors, sustained by lonely rage at the futility of every spent magazine. It doesn’t seem like I’m alone.
When I queue up for standard games in Dawn of War 2 these days, I tend to get bored of waiting before I find a single match. But with The Last Stand? I’m rarely left waiting for long, and you can still find people discussing the mode online these days, 15 years after Dawn of War 2’s final expansion came out.
The same is true of other co-op modes in the genre, like Starcraft 2’s excellent two-player missions. But I think The Last Stand has a unique quality that makes it worth going back to even if you don’t play RTS at all: it mutates the genre’s DNA so much that it actually just cracks the code on a PvE MOBA, and because it’s (almost) the only one, it takes the genre crown by default.
In this mode, nearly all the conventions of standard RTS play are stripped away. You only control a single hero unit, and you cycle between a few simple abilities restrained by resource costs and cooldowns. Sound familiar?
Dawn of War 2’s standard PvP modes had already (controversially, at the time) done away with base-building and labyrinthine research trees to focus on lean, tactical scraps. Last Stand just takes that distillation to its natural conclusion.
You might think of this as cynical trend-chasing now that the traditional RTS is an aging carcass and MOBAs remain a big deal, but The Last Stand first debuted in October 2009—the same month League of Legends released. If anything, the mode was sort of forward-thinking for its time.
It’s the perfect time for it to have come out, I reckon, because it has a lot of MOBA-esque ideas without feeling too similar to League or Dota. It feels like the result of alike influences rather than an impulse to ride the wave. As you play, you unlock wargear: weapons, accessories, and armor, each of which grants you new abilities and fundamentally alters your playstyle. Two space marine captains at the same level might play completely differently, with one toting a supportive healing aura and ranged bolter and the other tackling every witch in sight with lightning claws and heavy armor.
Even today, when there are so many great Warhammer-themed games all competing for your attention, it has a larger-than-average smorgasbord of playable xenos from the tabletop. Dawn of War 2: Retribution’s base roster of factions each lend a single hero: the orkish mekboy can be anything from an oppressive rocket-wielding tankbuster to an explosive, randomly teleporting imp, while the chaos sorcerer can possess enemies (yes, even a clone of himself!) or simply melt them with hellfire. The playstyles range from gimmicky as all hell, like that teleporting mekboy, to straightforward and suitable for learning the game, like the imperial guard hero who can call in a retinue of AI-controlled soldiers.
After Retribution’s release, The Last Stand was furnished with a faction selection even beyond that of the core game: the Necron overlord and (my favorite) the Tau battlesuit are a mite overpowered, but as a fanboy of the greater good who still wishes Fire Warrior was a decent game, I think I’m owed that. These factions are rarely playable in Warhammer videogames, most of which stick you in a familiar human body or its genetically super-enhanced astartes counterpart, and getting to draft your own uneasy alliance in this mode is a treat for fans of the tabletop game and its lore.
I think it says something about the hunger people have for a mode like this that it still attracts a chatty, if extremely small, group all these years later when so many alternatives exist. Darktide and Space Marine 2 might have bigger, more lavish horde-blasting modes for shooter fans, but there’s just something so very Warhammer about watching all the carnage unfurl from a bird’s eye view, anxiously wondering whether to dive behind cover or charge into melee.
It’s a smooth shot of what I dig about both MOBAs and Relic’s more tactics-oriented strategy games, like standard Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes, while remaining accessible to newcomers as it straddles two genres notorious for their complexity. Because you’re struggling against enemies you often can’t solo and there’s no economy to manage, no one can outscale their teammates so hard the challenge is trivialized. And there’s just enough build variety that every player gets to make their personalized mark shaving seconds off each wave.
Like plenty of dweebs addled by plastic glue fumes, I am looking forward to the release of Dawn of War 4 later this year, but it is more accurate to say I am specifically waiting to see its reprisal of Last Stand. While I’m glad DoW 4 looks to give diehard fans of the first game what they’ve been missing for the last two decades, the sequel more or less converted me to its RPG-inspired ‘ding gratz lol‘ way of thinking, and I’m more keen to see an evolution of its best ideas than I am a base-building blast from the past. I got countless hours out of this mode in DoW 2 despite its spartan setup for progression and nearly no baked-in replayability aside from the score attack aspect—the waves are always the same, and there are only two maps.
I’m hoping DoW 4 can remix things just enough to keep it fresher for longer, without compromising the purity nor the brutality that make The Last Stand so special.
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