Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

DOW is a good enough game for RTS fans out there. Harking back to the good old days of Command and Conquer, it takes resource management and troop building and maneuvering to accomplish each level successfully.

The learning curve isn't hard and you don't have to be a tactical genius to progress through the game. In fact, the simplest tactics often work for all the levels. For example, building up your base and slowly massing your forces before breaking out to massacre the enemy is often the only tactic you need. A couple of levels require you to accomplish goals before a set time limit, but there really isn't anything remotely challenging here.

That said, the game is enjoyable, if prolonged. Although only about a dozen levels in length, each one will take a few hours to complete. You could probably do them quicker. If anything my only fault was building too many units. When it came to the fights the enemy was slaughtered by overwhelming numbers.

The most useful unit in the game are undoubtedly the defence turrets. Start building those around the edge of your base as soon as you can and you can sit happily inside and build men and dreadnoughts to your hearts content as the enemy throw themselves inanely at your automatic defences. Keep a couple of mechanic units around to make running repairs and little will trouble you.

This is also the best way to deal with the occasional "Big Boss" that appears. Beef up your turrets and have a few squads of men behind them, then send out a squad to lure the level boss in to your killing zone.

As mentioned, the enemies aren't very smart, throwing themselves against your impenetrable wall of lead and plasma time and again. It would have been nice if they could have come up with better AI, but hey, it is a Games Workshop device to draw more players to the table-top version of the game. Draw them in, and have them spend ridiculous sums of money on the figures and "official" paints etc. So a difficult game would have been a non-starter.

Anyway, despite these gripes the best part of the game as far as I was concerned is actually the opening movie. This is, without a doubt, one of the best animated sequences I've ever seen and I never tire of watching it whenever I start up the game. If only they'd put a few more of these throughout the game, instead of the lame, overly long dialogue and cheesily animated characters they do have between levels.

In summary, good enough if you want something non-taxing. But don't look for much depth or skill.

EDIT: Wow! This is one of my most hated review ever! I guess Games Workshop fanatics are even more dedicated than Scientologists at rubbishing objective viewpoints :)

The game is really not in good shape right now. Even though Dawn of War came out 2-3 years after Warcraft 3, it has a lot of shortcomings compared to it. The game can't go full screen in 1080p. The game is not so old that it doesn't support 16:9 resolution. It's been an option in games since the early 2000s. The only reason for this is the laziness of the game's developers, there is no other explanation. You can't even change the key controls. The camera is too close to the map and this makes it difficult to control the units in the game. Your units can also get stuck in the environment or each other while moving, making progress completely impossible. Even though the game has sold close to 10 million copies and is still selling, the developers can't even be bothered to make a simple update that would allow us to change the in-game controls and make the game run in full screen at 1080p. If you're still selling the game, at least show some respect for your players and make these simple QoL updates.

This game is pretty cool. You get to build a base, and purge the xenos... Unless you are the xenos.

The opening scene, its really awesome, but then it turns to cheesy ingame sometimes lame cut scenes

I'll start with the good points:

The game has really well done and epic music, any fan of epic orchestral will love this, the squad system is almost brilliant. Multiplayer for this game is so much fun, the graphics are overall awesome

Bad points:

Really bad Singleplayer campaign,The rendering of some terrains is a bit badly done, the voice acting could be a bit better

Dawn of War is one of those games that takes something old and breathes new life into it. In this case, that thing is Strategy gaming. It seems that these days RTS games are nothing but clones of the last one, where greater numbers wins the day and huge armies are the norm. Enter Dawn of War.

DoW offers a new perspective on the genre, where instead of massive armies, the player takes control of a number of squads. With the exception of the Ork race, an army will consist of around 10 squads of infantry and a number of vehicles. This small number of units allows much greater strategic control during battle, as opposed to the "charge and hope" tactics of previous titles.

In addition to this, Relic have taken class-based damage to a new level. Where in previous games infantry could quite easily overpower a tank and destroy it, DoW forces the player to take control of what his troops are shooting at. Infantry armed with bolters will do virtually no damage to tanks, while lascannons are the same against infantry. This means that in order to win a battle, a player must specifically pick targets for his anti-vehicle squads. This allows a much deeper immersion into the game than there otherwise would have been.

All of this, however, is irrelevant when discussing the single-player campaign, which seems to have only been included as a training run. Whatever you do, don't buy this game expecting a deep, immersive single-player storyline. Instead, what this game offers is multi-player. Playing against my friends is the major reason I bought this game, and it's paid off very well. Supported methods of connection are: Internet play (battle.net-style servers), LAN, and direct IP connect. Unfortunately, with the direct connection, only two players may play (the host and the client).

All in all, Dawn of War is a terrific game, in my opinion the best game of last year (2004).