Originally published January 2016

Dawn of War is the game to which I attribute my initial interest in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I first played a small bit of DoW when the game came out over a decade ago, but never got around to finishing it. I had read the occasional book, comic, or web article about the franchise, and I had played a few games related to the universe, but I still never got the same itch some of my friends seemed to get in regard to the desire to become immersed in the lore. That is, until I recently played the original Dawn of War to completion, along with 2 out of the 3 expansion packs. Since then, I've become hooked on everything Warhammer 40K and can't get enough. Is it a testament to the quality of the game, or simply a coincidental accumulation of interest that has led me down the rabbit hole?

It's probably a mixture of both, but if there's anything that leads me to believe that Dawn of War is a good game, it's the fact that it also reinvigorated my interest in strategy games, which had been slightly waning as of late. So impassioned was I that I immediately jumped into the Winter Assault expansion pack after completing the single-player campaign of Dawn of War. Once that was done, I then jumped into Dark Crusade and played through the Space Marine campaign there. Since the game's mechanics at their core are the same throughout the expansions, their reviews will be shorter, but there are too many changes among them to just lump them into a single review. Today, we'll just focus on the original game's single-player experience.

Dawn of War Story

The Dawn of War franchise of games, by developers Relic, follows a particular chapter of Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The Blood Ravens, which I believe were created for this game, are a diverse group of marines with no real specialty to set them apart from other chapters besides their quest for knowledge and lack of history. The origins of their chapter are shrouded in mystery and as a result, they have a drive to seek out information. This makes them ideal protagonists for a video game in which players unfamiliar with the lore of the world can latch on and learn too.

However, they still behave appropriately stubbornly and as aggressively xenophobic as one would expect of a space marine. Led by Captain Angelos, the company of Blood Ravens descends upon the planet Tartarus, which has an immensely large human population that has come under attack from Orks. It's up to the Blood Ravens to clear out the Ork threat as quickly as possible. However, a warp storm is closing in on the planet, the Orks are behaving differently than usual, and the local residents are starting to go insane, which usually means that Chaos are around. Also space-elves.

If what I just said in the last paragraph mostly flew over your head because you never played Warhammer 40K, don't worry. It's not entirely important that you know any history of the universe or the aliens involved. The game won't necessarily hold your hand to explain it to you but should be able to pick it up and go along with it without any difficulty. The core game mechanics and story don't ask you to do anything more with that knowledge.

If anything, the Warhammer references and material are mostly superficial in terms of the complexity of the story. I'm certain that if you know more about the Warhammer 40,000 universe, you will get much more enjoyment out of the story and the events that play out. However, it's not mandatory since the story is still familiar, predictable, and cheesy, in a satisfying way. You've heard, played, and seen this sort of story before, so it doesn't require the extra knowledge to make it a Citizen Kane of its genre.

All the twists and turns are telegraphed miles away and serve as little more than backdrops to a mission, much like you might expect of a strategy game. If you hold every strategy game to the high esteem of a Blizzard game, you might be disappointed. I haven't played any Blizzard games since Starcraft, but I remember how much effort went into the stories of Warcraft and Starcraft, which are still intriguing and exciting 20 years later. However, they're also backed by a huge wallet and reputation that allows them to make games much longer and larger in scope than Dawn of War attempts to achieve.

Dawn of War is no masterpiece when it comes to the story, but the delivery of it is appropriately over-the-top as you would want from a Warhammer game. So long as you don't come to DoW expecting too complex of a story and just want an overly dramatic, epic reason to kill some aliens and demons, you'll have a good time.

Dawn of War Gameplay

Dawn of War is a real-time strategy (RTS) game. It's not as old as the original Starcraft, but due to its style and the fact that Starcraft is based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe, comparing the two is inevitable. The gameplay is relatively the same in that you build up your base and gather resources so that you can build stronger, deadlier units to go out and destroy the other army's base, or complete the goals specific to the mission, which is usually to destroy the other base.

The main differences between Dawn of War and Starcraft come in how you gain resources, the controls, and the dynamics of the armies in play. As opposed to Starcraft, you do not need to gather minerals to pay for a majority of your costs in the game. You still require the green Vespine gas equivalent through plasma generators, but when it comes to "mining," you no longer need to have any units responsible for collecting the materials. Instead, it is all gained automatically based on the buildings you've established and the number of strategic points you've captured on the map.

Scattered throughout the map are various strategic points. Capturing them, by making your squads stand next to them for a while, puts the point under your control and automatically gives you requisition points as a reward. A majority of said strategic locations can be built upon and upgraded as defense posts to increase the rate at which you gain requisition points and serve as extra turrets. The requisition points are then used to construct more buildings and squads. I greatly prefer this method of material gathering to using the same units that would be responsible for building and repairs to mine it all. It reduces the amount of necessary micro-managing and allows you to focus your efforts more on your army.

The population limit is controlled through upgrades made at your home base. Unlike other strategy games that force you to "construct additional pylons," Dawn of War just makes you research the upgrade at the base to increase the number of squads and vehicles you have on the battlefield. Then it's done. You don't have to build any more supply depots or whatever to make sure your squad cap stays the same… unless you play as the Orks. This takes away some of the strategy when attacking your opponent, but at the same time reduces the amount of building and resource management necessary, allowing for more focus on the battlefield. The ultimate limit is different for the various armies, with the space marine cap being somewhat small, especially by Ork standards. However, a fair amount of excitement can ensue on the battlefield with your limited supply of units.

If you want to focus on that excitement, you can actually zoom the camera down to eye level with the units and watch the fighting close-up. The graphics certainly didn't age well by any means, but it was a big deal at the time that you could get that close to the fray like in the Total War series. However, if you're like me, that's really only a novelty and a distraction that could end up losing you the battle because you're too busy looking at all the action and not at the enemy forces flanking your position.

If anything, I wanted the camera to pull out further than it did. So much of the screen is blocked by your main control panel, which is far too useful to hide, I always felt like I was getting 2/3 of the view I should have been getting. It was annoying because the hotkeys that were provided were all over the keyboard and could not be bound to anything else. This is a major no-no in PC strategy games because so much of the micro-management comes from your ability to react quickly and change your orders to the troops on the fly. Yet, the ability to move the camera on the screen was restricted to mouse-edging or the arrow keys on the keyboard, which are practically miles away from the other keys that were used for dispensing immediate commands. Thus, I was forced to keep my left hand on the arrows and my right on the mouse, ignoring hotkeys altogether. This is unfortunate because, if I knew the hotkeys, I wouldn't have had to put up with the massive toolbar I needed to dispense commands.

The hotkey problem wouldn't be a big deal if the AI of the units was better. Since I could not dispense commands through quick-selects and hotkeys, I had to rely on the mouse, menus, and maps. If they could make intelligent decisions about what to attack and defend, it could make up for my inabilities as the commander. Alas, the units are far from the word "capable" when it comes to thinking, which leads to some frustrating situations. I could not count the number of times I would be looking over the battlefield and see one of the squads simply standing in the middle of the firefight, not doing anything. They would just stand idle, as though I had ordered a cease-fire, while the world burned around them. Enemies would even be shooting them and I could see the units physically reacting to bullets and dying from them, but still, they would do nothing until I interrupted their idle brain waves and ordered them to attack. This sudden command would almost set them into a frenzy as they would return to killing everything around them like they were supposed to, even though their stance would dictate otherwise.

Each squad and unit had a stance ability to help control the AI. It was supposed to tell the units to either hold defensive positions or be aggressive and chase down the enemy. I rarely ever changed this from the standard defensive stance in which they would briefly give chase to the enemy before returning to their position. If I let them stay in the super aggressive stance, the chase would usually lead them directly into an ambush. Yet for seemingly no reason, the guys would just get lazy and stand there as bullet sponges until I stepped in and told them what to do. It was also annoying that if you told a squad to attack a building or unit if the squad members in the back row were not close enough, they would just stand there instead of getting within range and attacking. What kind of logic is that? It almost ruins the whole point of wanting squads in the first place.

Dawn of War separated itself from its competition by focusing on a squad-based strategy. While Starcraft and Warcraft made you control individual units en mass with only about 20 at a time, Dawn of War let you select them by squad, meaning that a lot more units could be fighting on the battlefield at the same time. As enticing as this is, it means that you have slightly less control over the units because they behave based on the squad they're in. Since all the units took up physical space on the battlefield, they'd sometimes get in each other's way, forcing me to maneuver them over and over again just to make sure they were all attacking a building, or moving out of the way of a big vehicle. Perhaps all this was intentional on the developer's part to force me to take into account how a big group of soldiers could create some issues in a confined space. Regardless of the reason, it made things frustrating at times.

Despite these frustrations, it did not prevent me from absolutely loving Dawn of War's campaign and basic gameplay format. I played a skirmish match or two on one of the numerous maps they included in the game, and the simple base and army-building mechanics are still very satisfying, especially when you send one massive group of space marines into the enemy base and wipe them all out. The single-player campaign provided some useful variety to the mix with the different maps and objectives that changed the basic strategy around. The missions themselves were inconsistent in how well they informed you of your objective or provided the tutorials necessary to figure out the true usefulness of a particular unit, but I only ended up failing a story mission once the entire time, and it certainly was not because the game was easy.

Perhaps I'm better at strategy games than I was when I first played Dawn of War and Starcraft, or it might just be that I'm quicker at adapting different play styles than I was, but I felt like DoW pushed and challenged me in just the right ways. It forced me to adopt different methods of attack than the typical strategies I used to employ when playing RTS games. This type of challenge is really what you want out of this genre. It managed to be tough enough to be a challenge, but not frustratingly difficult, making the victories taste that much sweeter. By the end, I had a much better understanding of how to use the Blood Ravens, its various vehicles, and the strategies I could utilize, which I would put to much greater use in the Dark Crusade expansion. For example, in the final mission, a boss unit, with an enormous amount of health and damage-output, wiped the floor with the marines I had available. However, since I had a particular building upgrade, I was able to steadily drop units directly in front of him and slowly wear him down, keeping him surrounded and isolated from any assistance.

Presentation

Dawn of War is an old game that certainly hasn't aged well. At the time of its release, I'm sure it was a technical powerhouse, but on my PC I found a windowed, lower resolution to be preferable to a full-screen experience of old blurry textures and close-ups of characters "talking." It was a design choice they would later rescind, but in Dawn of War, the camera zooms in really close to the characters' faces so you can see them open and close their gaping maws as the voice actors deliver their dialogue. It's comical and can take away from the drama of the moment when they look like fish gulping in water.

Graphical limitation aside, it's still a sight to behold when dozens of soldiers are smashing into each other and executing dramatically powerful moves on their opponents. Seeing the characters fly through the air as an explosion blasts away at their feet, while countless space marines scream, demanding that their foes die for the sake of the immortal emperor is satisfying, to say the least. The music never lets up in its drama and gets even more amped up as the battles themselves become more intense. However, it all ends up being forgettable due to the lack of downtime.

Even though the game is overly dramatic and the graphics may not have aged spectacularly, there is still a ton of attention paid to detail in how each unit looks and behaves. Even the buildings are interesting to look at just because of how much respect Relic has for the source material and how they want to bring the universe alive. It may not look great today, but it's effective and pulling me in nonetheless.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

A fantastic game that still holds up surprisingly well for its age, Dawn of War is a solid strategy game that does double-time. It serves as a solid introductory porthole into a universe filled with history and lore that spans dozens of rule books, character sheets, and novels. It also provides hours of entertainment as a founder of new types of real-time strategy gameplay that breaks away from the Blizzard norm. If you have exhausted your strategy game library and have never tried Dawn of War, I highly recommend it.