
	Platform PC Genre Real Time Strategy Developer Relic Publisher THQ ESRB Mature Released Q3 2005

- Excellent play balance - Strategy focus on action - Excellent presentation of Universe

- Only Space Marine campaign - Little bit short

Review: Axis & Allies (PC) Review: Red Alert 2 (PC) Review: WarCraft III (PC) Review: Rome - Total War (PC)
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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Winter Assault

Dawn of War

Score: 9.0 / 10

I probably haven't had more fun playing Dawn of War since I reviewed Warlords Battlecry 2. In similar fashion to the latter, Dawn of War is intensively addictive and completely satisfying. Everything is in place for a totally enjoyable gaming experience. With that said, Winter Assault extends the experience that you don't want to end by providing more content than is expected of most expansion packs. Taken together, or even apart, I would say that these titles stand with some of the all time great strategy games that I have played.

Dawn of War and Winter Assault take place in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Though I wasn't familiar with the universe, Dawn of War does a great job of introducing the world, the characters and the themes of the strange and violent universe. In Dawn of War, you play through a single player campaign for the Space Marines. The campaign is a little bit short, but the multiplayer and skirmish options provide enough gameplay to satisfy. Although there is no single player campaign for the other races; Eldar, Ork, and the Chaos Marines, you do get to play these races in the skirmish and multiplayer options. The story follows a chapter of the Space Marines known as the Blood Ravens. Though the story is not entirely unpredictable, the voice acting and short in engine cut scenes are enough to keep you interested. I also enjoyed the short sayings of the units when clicking on them. These really reinforced the atmosphere of the universe and I found them to be delightfully twisted.

Strategically, Dawn of War is fairly unique and has a great way of streamlining the gameplay to be action focused. There are only really two resources; requisition and electrical power. Requisition points are scattered across the maps and to gain control of a point, your troops must capture it by staying by the point. When capturing a point, your troops can not move, or attack enemy units. If they do, they will stop capturing the point. Once a requisition point is in your control, you automatically gain requisition points. To protect the requisition points under your control, you can build Listening Posts on the requisition point, as well as turrets

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around the points. As requisition is the primary resource in the game, this design decision provides the gamer with a very simply but effective way to engage them actively in resource gathering. Gaining control of requisition points is therefore completely integrated into the action oriented gameplay, and the game is always a careful balance of push and pull and action and defense in the pursuit to capture more requisition points.

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The other resource is necessary but is more traditional in its implementation. Electrical power is simply accumulated by building power generators. The number of generators is limited to a given number, however, only the later units really require power to create. As such, by creating your generators early, you should have plenty of power by the later stages in a mission to create the more powerful units. On the more difficult settings, electrical power is likely to be more important, however, on the normal difficulty setting on which I played, this resource didn't seem to ever be an issue.

To build your generators, listening posts and all your other traditional buildings, you have your builder units which are limited as they do not take up a slot in your limited population cap. There are two limits for your units each with a maximum of 20; a population cap for your infantry units, and a vehicle cap for your vehicle units. 20 may seem like a low number, however, infantry is made up of squads and each can have more than one individual person in it. For instance, a space marine squad takes up two population units, but in that squad you can have 10 squad members. This means that as long as one squad member is alive, you can strengthen your squad back up to full numbers. While adding members to a squad does cost you resources, it is cheaper to keep your squad alive and strengthen it than to create a new squad. This makes for some interesting guerrilla tactics during gameplay which you can employ and to which you will have to defend against.

The technology developments in the game are fairly standard, however after an improvement is automatically applied to your units, there are some upgrades that you can apply individually to your vehicles and squads. For instance, in a squad of snipers only one of the men can initially be outfitted with a weapon upgrade. After researching to increase the number of special weapons your squad can carry you can choose from three or four weapon types for that individual squad. This allows you to create some very specific squads and it can really make the difference in a battle where based on squad type and number both sides are evenly matched. Vehicles can also be upgraded in the same manner with optional weapons.

The unit types across the different races and how each race is played is actually quite unique. While the Space Marines are generally the most straightforward and battle hardy, the other races have some unique abilities and are actually quite different to play. For instance, the Eldar are a bit weaker but have great stealth capabilities and are able to easily and quickly transport troops all over the map. The Chaos Marines are somewhat similar to the Space Marines but have upgrade paths and unit types that differ wildly from them. The Orks have the power of numbers and can quickly create fairly powerful groups of units, but have somewhat weaker vehicle units.

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