Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (W4K:DoW) is one of the few strategy games out there that has made me feel like I was picking up Starcraft for the first time and playing it through again. Imitating Blizzard, Relic took a high quality FMV to set the stage, threw in some interesting lead characters, used lots of game-engine run cut scenes, created four races to battle against each other and managed to create a solid strategy game. This game is a treat to all RTS fans, even those who have no idea what Warhammer 4k is.

Pros:

The Storyline

W4K:DoW focuses on a team of Space Marines called the Blood Ravens. It starts off with some rather simple skirmishes against Orks but eventually a conspiracy begins to unravel. The Orks are being given technology by the Chaos group whom are searching the planet for a key that will open some ancient power. They are playing off the other factions in an attempt to delay the Space Marines and give themselves sufficient time to get the key. In between it all, are the Eldar, a sort of magical/technology race that both oppose the Space Marines and has their own agenda regarding the key. Similar to Warcraft III, there are 4 races pitted against each other. The main differences are there are fewer alliance/betrayals, and you only get one perspective of the war, the one from the view of the Space Marines. The campaign plot is surprisingly good. Although the cutscenes can drag on for a while, the storyline provides enough motivation to understand the contexts of which the missions are being fought, and the characters while extremely scarce in number, are developed with enough intrigue that the game builds up with a reasonable amount of momentum.

Sounds

Voice acting is superb for the cut scenes and given the context of science-fiction space battles, I was surprised they managed to pull it off well without sounding cheesy or cliche. It reminded me of Warcraft III, where you have powerful war leaders with their intense voices calling out orders and relaying commands. The unit responses are very fitting of a strategy game and again were well up to par with the standard set by Blizzard.

Graphics

W4K:DoW looks rather similar to Warcraft III, and maybe could be seen as a glimpse of what Starcraft would have looked like running in 3d. It uses a simplified 3d-model engine, which can be panned and zoomed in appropriately to show the detail put into the models and also allows the user to get closer to the action. The graphics engine most importantly is fast loading and without lag. It can also output a reasonable amount of models on the screen at a time. That said system specs are fair, the game ran without a hitch on my Athlon 2500+ and my Radeon 9800 SE at high quality texture and high resolutions but could probably go as far as a 1.4 Pentium with a Geforce 5200 on minimum settings.

Gameplay

The campaign missions are reasonably fun, they are a bit simple and don't have really have multiple objectives however. The goal of all the missions is basically to mass up and destroy everything on the screen. There are no solo missions unfortunately, the kind of infiltration missions where you send a group of guys through a maze of enemies and try to get from point A to point B, which is kind of disappointing since the game seems to set itself up for some.

The gameplay essentially is similar to most other RTS games. You get a few heroes that you can control which are better than your average troops and have a few special powers. It would have been nice if they could gain in experience and gain powers but they don’t. Base-building is pretty much the same as any other game, the game gives you a builder and you can tech up to construct more buildings and train new units. Resource acquisition has a slight twist. Rather than mining a particular resource with some kind of resource acquisition unit, resources are acquired by capturing strategic points. The more strategic points you control, the faster your acquisition of money. There are also power requirements which can be handled by building power plants. The more of those you control, the faster energy accumulates. The use of strategic points essentially forces the user to go with a kind of expansionist strategy. You attack, control, fortify and expand from point to point until you feel you're strong enough to force a push on the enemy.

Human units you control come in squads rather than as individual units. You can expand the squads by adding more members and you can equip each squad with certain weapons as well. Vehicles though are still controlled though as solo units.

W4K:DoW focuses less on micromanagement and is less fast paced than most strategy games. While the enemy will attack you periodically to keep you on your toes, this follows much more of a Starcraft type of gameplay where you build your perfect defense, let your resources accumulate, and then mass up as strong of an army as possible and go out to eliminate the other opponent.

Multiplayer

W4K:DoW has very well balanced factions but unfortunately multiplayer games are a bit harder to find as no one plays this game that much. Blizzard with its dominating hold on multiplayer games, unfortunately drags most of the best strategy gamers to their realm, leaving W4K:DoW a bit short in gamers. If you can find enough friends to play it with though, this is perhaps the best and most entertaining aspect of W4K:DoW.

Cons:

11 Missions ain't enough for any strategy game.

I'm not sure what Relic was thinking, but including 11 missions in a game that is supposed to be a stand-alone is just bluntly cheap. While there is a fair amount of storyline that wraps up the beginning and end of each mission, it is just not forgivable to make a game that has only about 7-8 hours of single player gameplay! They should have included at least 20 missions, which is the size of a normal standard game, and it would have been nice to play the other races rather than just one campaign focused on the Space Marines.

The units are lacking and the tech tree is simplistic.

The game's tech tree is kind of simple, and the lack of units also does not help. There are only four kind of infantry that can be built. The gun turrets are quite powerful early on, they can slaughter most units easily that you can almost always tech your way to highest tier and gain access to the best units without having to build any of the weaker units. Added to that, upgrading buildings (or "teching") in W4K:DoW is fairly easy and is the main goal of most strategy since it is required to get the best units. The game is not balanced nearly as well as Blizzard's Warcraft III where there is large tradeoff in defense for upgrades for teching in the early game. In W4K:DoW the strategy is slightly simpler, build the perfect defense and acquire points, gain access to the best units, and never build any lower tier units. So in the end what does this mean? It means that only 2 vehicles, the landrover and predator are ever really used, while most of the infantry is used. Once you acquire the landrover and predator, the mission is pretty much over, you only need to build about 4 of them and I have not managed to lose one in battle even on the last mission, where the difficulty theoretically should have been greatest.

The build cap is miniscule.

This is the most painful part of W4K:DoW is that it does not allow really massive, large scale battles. The build cap for Space Marines is set at 20 for infantry and 20 for vehicles. Because each of the top-tier vehicles take up anywhere from 4-5 and the higher tech infantry represented about 4 units per squad, you can only build about 5 groups of infantry and maybe 4-5 tanks! While infantry can be expanded to hold as much as 8 men per group, that still only makes for a total of about 40 soldiers on screen with 5 tanks, a truly pathetic amount in comparison to the massing capacities of games like Starcraft where the build cap was at 200.

Little micromanagement

This game requires virtually little actual movement of units in battle, simply send your units over to where destruction needs to be done, and watch them go at it. In Warcraft III, unit control is essential and the best players know how to focus fire their units. In W4K:DoW unit control is at a minimal, it's mainly send in your guys and let them duke it out. For some gamers this is preferred, but it would have been nicer to actually have something to do during battles, rather than watching them proceed along. Most of the time I was left idly rotating the camera, occasionally backing of units that were in trouble and attacking a unit leader, but for the most part it was all one sided annihilation.

Conclusion:

W4K:DoW is a fun strategy game with a great plot. It’s like playing a single race campaign in Warcraft III, it provides enough entertainment for a few hours, but unfortunately gets old quickly as the tech tree is found to be far too limited, and the strategy against the computer is a bit simple. The multiplayer mode is the shining aspect of W4K:DoW but requires a few dedicated friends with copies of the game to really enjoy. If you truly love strategy games and feel a bit played out of the Blizzard scene, W4K:DoW is a nice change of pace with a different universe. Well worthy of a purchase despite some painful limitations in its gameplay.

Recommended: Yes