Underlying Simplicity Makes it Fun to Watch & Play
Written: Aug 17 '05 (Updated Aug 17 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: Does away with typical RTS micromanagement, brings out the heart of the Warhammer universe
Cons: Short game, only one race for the campaign
The Bottom Line: Want an RTS that lets you focus on pure combat and strategy? This is the game for you! Warhammer adaptation is nigh-impeccable and adds a new freshness to RTS play.
wsmunch's Full Review: Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War for Windows
(This is a repost of my original, which fell through some epinions crack & disappeared)
There have been a number of Warhammer games published for the PC, but so far none have come even close to the success of Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. I've never played any of the other Warhammer games since, quite frankly, none of them stirred the gaming community enough to garner my attention. While I've also never participated in the tabletop game (which the computer games are based off of), I have been witness to the game being played by groups of people while I was in-between rounds for Magic the Gathering tournaments. The people who are serious about their Warhammer hobby are the ones who delicately paint all of their metal-marine figurines down to the last war-worn detail. These are the people who will flame a game toting the title "Warhammer" if the name is the only coincidence between the pewter and electronic. A game that bears little resemblance to it's origin (movie, book, another game, etc) has a hard time pleasing the masses when accuracy is expected but not accounted for, which is completely reasonable. Dawn of War keeps a critical eye on the futuristic fantasy world of Warhammer 40k, so it's no wonder that it exceeds all the combined attempts of the other games since it caters to connoisseurs of the genre by delivering the same miniature-manipulating experience straight to the PC. Not only is the game accurate (as much as it can be), but it does away with the hassles of typical RTS micro-management while maintaining a fun, action-oriented squad-strategy at it's core.
Graphics
It's just cool to watch what's going on, especially when you can zoom in to get a close look at melee fighting or zoom back out to see the chaotic battle clashes unfold. The units themselves are detailed, but not super-detailed like you would see in a miniature. You can still get a close-up look of marines (and other units) with their insignias, belts, battle-worn edges, weapons, backpacks, etc. While I was almost hoping for more unit detail, I realized later on that it would detract from the game since most of the time I was zoomed out to command my squads, and more detail would make the game run slower during battles. The Warhammer polygons seem beautifully modeled like the units in the Warcraft 3 engine, and have a nice flow of movement about them. Even though the minute detail is left out, all of the structures, units, and even wastelands mirror those that can be purchased at a local hobby store. The colors, weapons, proportions, and especially the poses are just like what can be found packaged and priced. Now I'm not too sure about all the structures, since I really don't remember seeing base-structures when people were playing on a table; just the units. But if they were created just for this game, then they look like they belong. Where Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War really stands out graphically is the amount of detail toward the terrain, shadows, buildings, rubble, and weapon effects. Not only do the maps look like a proper battlefield, they feel like one when two armies collide in a fight for superiority with guns blazing and missiles firing. I especially like the animated effects when missiles strike the ground in an explosion of dirt with a small crater for a signature. The animations are varied depending on the type of fighting, the enemy they're fighting, and if they're dealing or receiving. The units have individual interaction with enemies so you don't feel subject to the same mundane attack animations like in older RTS games. This game is all about the amazing animations. The camera can rotate in any direction so you can get any perspective on the map that you want, such as the typical overhead view, an eye-level view of the soldiers, or any angle in between.
The game is pretty bloody, which I like, and is appropriate for the Warhammer universe, which is indeed bloody. Weapon fire will cause spurts of blood from enemies being struck, as does melee strikes. Did I mention that Warhammer is violent too? Enemies that try to engage a mech in close combat will quickly find themselves in a mechanical, crushing grip that squeezes them like a lemon before discarding their empty corpse halfway across the screen. Or in the case of the Ork's mech, a sawblade will lop an enemy in half with enough blood to satisfy. The mechs have a few more fatal animations along with their spinning and striking that sends enemy units flying back. With all this blood, grenades, swords, guns, mechs, troops, explosions, close combat, ranged fire, tanks, turrets, special abilities etc, etc.. we get a graphically intense game when there are 100+ units on the screen all doing their own thing; just as long as you have a decent videocard, of course, maybe something like this. Coupled with the sound, the computer presents a gritty war zone and sometimes I just sit engrossed and watch the battles progress, especially from different angles. I like good-looking action-packed graphics. Everything that could be imagined with the tabletop game has been brilliantly translated to
While the game itself looks great, the cutscenes aren't quite as good. The mouths of the characters maw open and closed with little regard for synching, and the animation doesn't seem as smooth as it should be, considering how great everything else is. They look like dolls with stiff legs and the ability to about-face in a split-second with no leg movement. But since the cutscenes are short in comparison to the missions, it's easy to overlook. It's more for the in-between story anyway.
Sound
I don't know who does the music (I guess I should check the credits or something) but it is amazing. There are a number of orchestrated music tracks that play in the background during missions, and just like in Fable I didn't really take notice until I paused just to listen. The music will fade in and out depending on the intensity of the game and fits the mood of Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War perfectly. My friend complained that the music is all wrong, but considering the Warhammer universe I think that the ambient gothic choirs and courageous battle anthems fit the mood perfectly. I enjoy grim war music in games as much as I do in grim war movies. The voice-overs for the units are particularly keen in representing their distinctive personalities and are of solid delivery. Units sound off sharp and confidant (with a few exceptions), even when they're routing. One complaint (as with most RTS games) is the repetitive acknowledgement when giving orders to units. I wish they added more voice clips to break that up a bit, and maybe additional clips for repeatedly clicking on the units (like in Warcraft games). The sounds of battle are excellently done to match the quality of the graphics. The mix of machinegun fire, laser weapons, explosions, plasma bolts, and the clash of swords/axes on armor coupled with the cries and shouts of the armies perfectly complement the action seen on the screen.
Gameplay
This is where Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War separates itself from other RTS games. Where most RTS games require "gatherer" units to supply resources to build and equip your base, Dawn of War does away with most of those traditional elements in favor of a system which is effective and true to the tabletop gameplay. A player needs power and requisition points to "purchase" units, upgrade, and build structures. Power is generated per-second from power plants, and the base is built by the basic construction unit. Requisition points, on the other hand, are acquired by the means of securing "strategic points". The idea of the game's strategic points is that you gain a foothold on the map; an abstract position of tactical importance. Infantry is used to secure these locations, and by doing so you increase the number of requisition points that are generated at a per-second tick. There are also relic locations that can be captured in the same fashion and will grant requisition and allow the most powerful unit and structure upgrades. Since the locations can be recaptured just as easily as they were taken, it behooves a player to place a listening post on the spot to make it difficult to take back. Weapon upgrades to the post not only make it harder to reclaim but it also increases the amount of requisition points you get. That, accompanied by some defensive turrets, can help repel attempts to thwart your monetary advances. More captured points means a greater income to fuel your forces from support in orbit.
Orbit? Yup, that's right. Structures requisitioned arrive with a crash into the ground while your constructor unit completes the job rather quickly. Units are summoned the same way, either landing on the top of your barracks in a pod, or transported by a drop-ship as in the case of vehicles. Of course, the animations and sounds are top-notch. There are a limited number of structures and upgrades available so a player will find less to do within the confines of the base and be able to focus more on their combat squads and mission at hand. The only real amount of micromanagement in the game is reinforcing squads and upgrading their weapons, both of which are done through the squads and has nothing to do with the base once the upgrades have been researched. Squads of marines come 4 to a group, and when the group is highlighted you can click on a button to "reinforce" the squad. After a number of seconds, another units materializes and joins the squad. The same applies to the weapon upgrades. Just click on what type of weapon you want to upgrade a member of the squad with (it never matters which one, just that the squad will have a unit with that weapon) and after a brief wait the weapon appears in one of the members' hands. This is such a refreshing feature, as opposed to the typical wait for newly-produced units to make a beeline across the map to join your forces already in battle. There is no worry of ambush and no worry of wait. A full-force marine squad can consist of 8 marines, 4 heavy weapons, 1 sergeant, and 1 attached leader. Since units are directed as a squad and not as individuals, it eliminates the micromanagement of locating and directing all your men during a frantic confrontation. Instead of trying to handle 60+ individual units, you're only dealing with about 6 squads of soldiers. During a typical battle, a player would be directing infantry and vehicles to attack while the only micromanagement is a keen eye to continually reinforce units that are losing soldiers and heavy weapons. This melds with the heart of the Warhammer ideology in the sense that there is no such thing as retreat/regroup. Instead you stand your ground and hold for the reinforcements to help turn the tide of battle. Other than that, only grenades and powers/abilities make up the rest of the clicking which isn't part of directing combat.
Units move and attack as a squad, so you can't single out a particular unit (like the one with the flamethrower) to kill it, unless it's a vehicle, since they are individual. This can tend to be a small issue when you're trying to navigate vehicles and soldiers through narrow streets or canyons, as the vehicles tend to get confused when there isn't enough room to maneuver. As infantry takes damage they start to lose life and the green health bars shorten. Apothacaries can be attached to a squad to increase health regeneration, otherwise there is no healing units, just reinforcing new ones. Not only will enemy fire will wither the health bar, but will also shorten their morale bar, represented in blue, as well. Dawn of War makes effective use of morale in combat as squads that have their morale reach zero will suffer penalties and therefore be much less effective in combat. Sergeants grant the ability "rally" which will fully replenish the morale of the squad as well as increase the rate of morale regeneration. Sergeants are reinforced just the same as a squad member (though only once you've researched it). Morale plays a key part in the strategy since even the strongest squads can succumb to lesser enemies if they have been routed. Certain enemies and weapons are much more effective at breaking morale, though have some limitations (weapons). Only infantry have a morale meter, which replenishes itself continuously. Vehicles are immune to morale effects.
For the first 4 missions, I thought "man this game is easy to play.. in all aspects.. the AI is wimpy", before I figured out I forgot to change the difficulty from default. After switching the difficulty from normal to insane I found that I had to adapt to the new enemy which made the old one look docile and sweet. The insane difficulty delivers a much more aggressive enemy which attack in greater numbers. New players to the RTS genre may find the default difficulty setting enough to wrestle with, but experienced RTS players will have little trouble with the game, even on insane. Well, there are a couple of levels that definitely test some limits, but nothing that can't be overcome. Besides, any true RTS champion finds only the best opponents in multiplayer games as the AI in skirmishes and campaigns won't throw any new surprises at you. Every building and upgrade has a shortcut key so those used to hotkeys and shortcuts from RTS games will find everything familiar here.
Strategy
The units have a number of stances and attack priorities to choose from as well as a variety of heavy weapons to upgrade to. The default stances worked well enough for me, but those with greater plans of action can have units attack or hold a position a particular way such as: keeping ranged distance, attacking ranged but engaging in melee if the enemy gets close, defending a particular area, staying put and firing, chasing down an enemy until you say stop, etc. When it comes to equipping your squads with advanced weaponry you have to take into consideration the enemy you're fighting and how you wish to approach. Examples: heavy bolters are very effective against infantry but you gotta be stationary to fire, flamethrowers are very effective at breaking morale but have short range, plasma guns are very effective against heavy infantry but are medium range and inaccurate when moving, and rocketlaunchers are very effective against vehicles and buildings but are slow to fire. If your enemy is coming at you with tanks, it would behoove to equip with rocketlaunchers. If your squads don't have rocketlaunchers and if they're not doing that great of a job, you'll be able to reinforce new units and hand them a launcher to get the job done. If your enemy is mostly heavy infantry, it would be more effective to equip your troops with plasma guns instead of the heavy bolters, etc.
Dawn of War also implements cover in ranges of light, medium, and heavy and are usually craters or foliage. Units in cover will take less ranged damaged and regenerate morale at a faster rate too. There is also negative cover, usually in water, which will penalize units and increase the damage taken. If utilized properly, a squad of soldiers with the defensive bonuses of cover can potentially withstand an overwhelming offense. In terms of strategy, this can be important since the number of squad units you have are limited. A single squad within medium or heavy cover can hold a choke-point to prevent the enemy from advancing, without much need of additional troops. Instead, those other troops can be poised in locations to strike at the enemy's base when that original squad comes under fire. The enemy has a limited number of deployable squads just as you do, so if most of their guys are attacking you in one place, that means they have little left to defend someplace else. If you're threatening the enemy really well, usually their soldiers will pull away from the initial strike to swarm your army attempting to ravage their base. If you have the guts and the resources, you can advance the troops in hopes to crush their army if you knocked out a couple of their key buildings already.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War will force the players who tend to "turtle" to adapt more of an aggressive approach of turtling. There isn't much sense in securing positions and waiting for an attack, which will come and only weaken your forces and reduce your odds at an effective counter-attack. The longer the game drags on (usually past the 30 minute marker) the more difficult (or even impossible) it becomes to win due to attrition, especially if your enemy has enough strategic points. You can sit for hours repelling wave after wave of enemies and never really get anywhere. I would encourage Dawn of War players to throw restraint (not caution, mind you) into the wind and have at it at the enemy. Aside from the bolter turrets, there is nothing in the game that caters to defense; everything is pretty much meant to rumble over and crush the opposition. Let the pugilist out of you and give it a chance to play. Now I'm not saying that you can't turtle, just that you have to be an aggressive one. I'm more of a turtle-player, but I had to adjust my strategy so I could complete the mission without wasting hours upon hours. As long as I kept those potential areas where the enemy could break through and reach the heart of my base guarded, I could keep a strong turtle-force securing locations, turreting strategic points, and then advancing methodically. Most of the time the enemy wouldn't send units towards my base if I had my army in range to intercept, they'd just come right to me. That wasn't always the case though and sometimes I'd have to pull my army back to settle things before it knocked on my barracks' doors. What was almost always the case was me putting my army directly in the way of where the enemy would advance and force that confrontation so I wouldn't have to pull back on my position. That didn't work for every mission, especially where the enemy had more than one base. Anyway, my turtle way of creeping up the map would be about 6 fully-packed squads of infantry backed by a few dreadnoughts, then backed by 6 or 7 whirlwinds. Whirlwinds are tanks equipped with missiles that have a long range and can be fired blindly. I would run up some scouts to see where the enemy was, and then have the whirlwinds completely saturate the area until nothing was left. Any units that approached me were decimated pretty quickly by my missile assault and support troops. This tactic worked pretty well until some later maps where I found that managing multiple squads all over the map helped cover enemy advances from all directions. Even with transports, it takes a bit of time to cover the span across a map, which of course forfeits the front-attack position that you had wrestled for. Whichever strategy I had to use, it seemed more successful when offensive. If you back off for too long, the enemy will just rebuild so you have to make sure to keep advancing and eliminating everything in the way, or else you won't make any progress.
The two things that I REALLY love about the space marines are the terminator squads and the orbital relay. The terminator squads are tough and deadly marines. After they're requisitioned and ready to go, terminator squads will remain "loaded" in the chapel barracks until you call them. You can pick any visible location on the map and have that terminator squad dropped right there. The orbital relay allows you to do the same thing with regular marine squads and also the dreadnoughts. On a couple missions I snuck a scout behind an enemy base and dropped two terminator squads and 4 dreadnoughts down and they caused complete havoc. The last few missions, I found myself thrusting my entire force at the enemy and dropping mechs and terminators into the fray to replace just-destroyed units. It's cool that the relay can store up to 5 ready-to-go, pre-purchased units even if you can't drop them yet. It was a complete lifesaver to drop 5 dreadnoughts down, just as all my mechs were obliterated and my marine squads were down to a couple men each. It bought me more time for my infantry to reinforce and for my base to send more units from orbit. The orbital relay and terminator squads definitely made for some fun tactics.
Story
So what's this Warhammer all about anyway? The opening cinematic is jaw-dropping and describes it briefly. Basically take your medieval fantasy races and thrust them into the future. What you get are advanced humans, orks, eldar (elves) with swords, banners, guns, armor, fierce mechanical units of destruction, and a thirst for battle. The Space Marines are imperialistic, and their lives and actions put forth for the emperor (you'll hear that a lot). As you progress through the missions you'll come to know how the Orks love battle and hate weakness, the Eldar are sneaky and secretive, and the Chaos Space Marines are marines gone demonic with a hunger for power. The story is interesting enough, at least to string along the missions. I have no clue how much it actually pertains to the Warhammer universe, but compared to the literature available I'm sure it's paper-thin. I don't think anyone minds though, since we want to play a good PC Warhammer game, not so much read one.
The single player campaign starts with a tutorial mission for the Space Marines and ends 10 missions later. It didn't take too long to beat the game (even on insane from level 5) and I was hoping for a bit more. Unfortunately the other races only have a single tutorial mission to acquaint the player before jumping into multiplayer. Maybe they might add an expansion pack that would include campaign missions for the other races, but we'll have to see and settle with multiplayer gaming until then.
Multiplayer
Most of the single player missions require the elimination of the enemy or a specific objective achieved to complete the level. Multiplayer games open up a number of options for success, such as securing a percentage of strategic points or holding a couple of key locations for a defined period of time. While the single player campaign focuses on the space marines, multiplayer allows the choice of the other playable races: Orks, Eldar, and Chaos Space Marines. What is really cool about multiplayer is that you can fully customize your armies with any colors that you want (like primary color, secondary, eyes, etc), and you can also change banners and insignias. The races, while similar, have differences that make them distinct. Each seem to be pretty well balanced in their own way where one race isn't better or more powerful than another one by default. I haven't played the other races in multiplayer, aside from the initial tutorial mission, since I'm not that good at RTS games against human opponents. I prefer FPS games as my forte. But with the explosive nature of the game, I'm sure that multiplayer is much more exciting than the campaign missions and will eventually draw me in for a scrim here and there.
Summary
With the way that Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War keeps the resource gathering simple, the total number of upgrades and structures limited, and the time to complete construction short, it forces all the action and micromanagement where it's supposed to be; combat. Players will rarely have to attend to base-matters once the game gets going and they can spend all the time plotting their attacks and moving their units. Even the way Dawn of War handles the grouping and reinforcing of squads makes commanding an army much cleaner than messing around with scores of individual soldiers. The game's races and units are balanced well so no player will find any race better than another (for multiplayer), nor will they be able to win on infantry or vehicles alone. With everything being easy yet effective, it makes the game really fun to play and much more rewarding to watch since you can stare at the action and not have to worry about babysitting the base since the micromanagement is all with your army. The developers of this game did a laudable job at taking the signature elements of the Warhammer 40k tabletop game and accurately translating it to a game that we can play on the computer. If you're an RTS fan and have NOT bought Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War yet, you're really missing out on great gameplay, graphics, and strategy. I'm looking forward to future games being influenced by this fresh new type of RTS formula.
Developed by award winning Relic Entertainment, Dawn of War II ushers in a new chapter in the acclaimed RTS series, taking players to the brutal front...More at Buy.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.