For the emperor, indeed.
Dawn of war is an amazing RTS game that manages to offer up some compelling battle narrative alongside its violent conflicts with various space creatures. Those violent and bloody conflicts make up Dawn of War’s short but sweet single-player campaign. In traditional RTS fashion, new units are trickled down throughout the missions and new strategies emerge to keep up with the ever increasing difficulty. My particular favorite was to upgrade about 4 Space Marine squads and then take about 3 predator tanks to soak up and dish out damage. It was a strategy that served me well for as long as the Space Marines and Predator Tanks were both readily available. That’s not to say it’s the only strategy that works, I certainly had some success mixing in Dreadnoughts and Assault marines. Still, there’s nothing quite like breaking through an enemy position and then capturing said position with your marines. Those positions, or strategic points as they’re called, are one of two resource producing structures. Strategic points generate requisition, while generators produce power. The great thing about this is that it places the emphasis of the entire game on your military’s strength and health, effectively making the entire game about combat.
It’s a good thing that the core combat is so much fun since you spend practically all of the game doing it. You know what’s more fun than the core combat? Calling down an orbital strike from your fleet, and cleansing the surface of Tartarus from the heretics. Okay, I didn’t actually use the orbital bombardment that much, but it’s featured heavily in the wonderfully produced cinematics. The story is also featured heavily in these cutscenes. In fact, the story only shows up in these cutscenes, with a few exceptions of in game dialogue. It follows the story of Captain Gabriel Angelos (the main hero unit and force commander of the blood ravens), the librarian Isador Akios (spellcaster for first half), and the inquisitor Mordecai Toth (spellcaster for back half) as they try at first to stop and then escape an Ork invasion. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Warhammer 40K game if multiple races didn’t show up. The Eldar and Forces of Chaos are minor and major players in multiple missions, but mostly they just serve to vary the enemies you will fight over the 12 missions of the campaign.
I’ve been talking a lot about the campaign, but there’s still a whole bevy of other modes to talk about. Namely the multiplayer, skirmish, and army painter modes. The first two are fairly self-explanatory and just as awesome as the campaign. I’ve only played a comp stomp with my brother, but I was impressed with the number of options available to change up the game. There’s rules that allow for win conditions like hold 2/3rds of the strategic points on the map for a specific period of time, total annihilation of your enemy, total annihilation of hq’s, assassnation of the enemy commander, sudden death where the first strategic point capture wins, and even an economic victory condition. With more than 20 maps, you’re probably not going to bore your LAN party friends. I bet the online community is still somewhat active, too.
Then there’s the army painter mode. It’s supposed to emulate actually painting Warhammer figures, but it’s really all about making your army look different than your opponents army. That’s not to say you can’t make some pretty detailed armies, but the graphics aren’t super defined like some warhammer figures are. There’s a good look to Dawn of War, though, the models have that particular disproportion distinct to the 40k universe and the commander units are well defined with lots of fine detail.
Dawn of War is exactly what you would want from the Warhammer universe. You get deep and strategic combat, bloody space racism, and pretty little men that walk around and kill each other. For the emperor, indeed.
