Originally published January 2016

After finishing the original Dawn of War and seeking more strategy and destruction in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, I immediately installed the expansion pack, Winter Assault. Winter Assault, while a shorter single-player experience, brings a fair amount of excitement and drama to the table, along with some significant frustrations.

Gameplay

Army Mechanics

First of all, Winter Assault has more than one single-player campaign. These campaigns require the player to use a total of 4 different armies. Each army is vastly different from one another in both characteristics and playstyle. The strengths and weaknesses of the units in each army are based on the lore and history of their societies within the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which drastically changes the strategy for each individual army. Since so much of the story and experience is dependent on using the different races, it makes more sense to discuss these details first and gather a little background information before going into the story. That way, those who are completely unfamiliar to the Warhammer 40,000 universe won't be so lost for the rest of the review.

The campaign is split up into two: Order and Disorder. In the Order campaign, you play as the Eldar and the Imperial Guard. On the other side, you play as the Chaos Space Marines and the Orks. Let's quickly break them all down.

Imperial Guard

These guys are regular humans. They're not the augmented super soldiers known as Space Marines, which (by Warhammer's standards) are a completely different army type. However, the humanity shared between the Space Marines and the Imperial Guard makes them allies as servants to the immortal Emperor of Mankind.

The Imperial Guard is something of an ant army: you can build up lots of units quickly and cheaply. They also die rather easily, but their weapons can be devastating in groups, and their vehicles are very powerful. They also have the ability to travel through "tunnels" under their buildings, which means if there are two buildings on opposite ends of the map, soldiers can immediately be transported from one end of the map to the other, allowing for fast easy deployment. They're fast shock troops meant to wear down the enemy through speed and number. No one ever expects them to win in a fight, but somehow they manage, even against the far superior Space Marines on occasion.

Eldar

Eldar are the elves of space. They have the same attitude as elves: smug dicks who think they're better than everyone else, even though they're a dying species whose time has passed. Likewise, they also have "superior" technology and skills. I'm rarely a fan of elves in any fantasy series because they tend to follow the same pattern of being pretentious dicks who don't know what they're talking about, but still think they're better than everyone else. The Eldar are certainly no different.

In terms of strategy, these guys mostly use stealth attacks. A majority of their units in the army and some of their structures can be cloaked, making them hard to find on the battlefield by an enemy, unless the enemy has a special scouting ability. They're fast, and their units can do a lot of damage, but they tend to have less health and are expensive, so you won't be able to amass a large army with them.

Orks

Spelled differently, but what you expect, the Orks are a bunch of "greenskins" who go around causing trouble and creating war wherever they go, just for the sake of war. Violent and goofy, the Orks are a source of much slapstick comedic relief in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Their culture is simply built around war and constant violence. They're all likely to kill each other until a strong enough warboss is present to rein them all in against a common enemy. When they aren't busy killing each other, these guys multiply and multiply to form massive armies.

With that in mind, the player can amass the largest number of units on a map at a time with the Orks. It's like a thick swarm of green terror. Their units do average damage, but their morale stays high so long as enough of them are on the battlefield, making their damage more consistent than most. These guys are just plain fun because they're for the people who, like myself, enjoy selecting all of their army and throwing it at an enemy at once like a big battering ram.

Chaos Marines

They're Space Marines who have been corrupted by the dark powers and sold their souls and minds to ancient Chaos gods of space. There's a lot of ancient lore around the origins of these guys and who they were before they succumbed to chaos, but fundamentally, they are Space Marines with the added bonus of units that use demonic abilities.

That being said, since they lack the will and strength of their former battle brothers, their health and armor are not always the best. As a result, they cannot match overwhelming forces like the Orks or Imperial Guard when going head-to-head. Instead, they use variety to win because, although their units have low health and are very weak against particular enemies, they also have high damage output. They're the specialists in the rock-paper-scissors game. If you happen to choose the Chaos "rock" against the opponent's "scissors," they will be crushed, but if the opponent has "paper" instead, you have almost no hope.

Campaign Mechanics

Much like the previous Dawn of War, the campaign objectives usually involve a little more flair and creativity than simply blowing up the enemy's base when it comes to completing the missions. In fact, there was one instance where I had to go back and start the mission over because I had completely forgotten the objectives and had wiped out my enemy when I actually needed some of the units alive. I blame myself for not paying enough attention to that mistake, considering the game clearly had the goals on the screen the whole time.

Still, the objectives are not always clear. It can be a little vague at times, for an RTS game that is usually pretty up-front about what you need to do in order to win. This can be a little troublesome considering the jump in difficulty from the original Dawn of War. The overall game is not significantly harder than it was before, but there are particular missions and moments in missions that border on absurd in terms of what you have to do in order to win with the tools you are given.

I actually found the Disorder campaign to be the more difficult of the two, partially because of the poor defense of the Chaos Marines and how few resources there always seemed to be for the Orks. The first 2 or 3 missions of the 5-mission campaign were fun and perfectly satisfying, but when I got to the fourth mission, I had to start over a dozen times, at least. It was baffling to me how difficult that mission was in comparison to the rest of the game. It happened to be the same goal and story of the Order campaign, but when I completed it as the Imperial Guard, I didn't have to try it more than once.

Let me explain this particular mission because it's pretty much the reason I didn't finish Winter Assault within 2 days. There is a mission in both campaigns where the goal is the same and all four of the armies are vying for control. It's the turning point in the story where only one may succeed. Thus, it doesn't matter which campaign you choose, eventually you will get to this map. The ultimate goal of this particular mission is to get one of your armies from one end of the map to the other, navigating the labyrinthian path to the exit. The exit itself is closed by a forcefield and requires an army to take control of a specific point on the map to open it.

Seems relatively straightforward, right? Well, there's more to it than you might think. Due to the fact that you have 4 competing armies, but can select only 2 campaigns, there's some overlap. Since this mission is the same for both the Order and Disorder campaigns, the game allows players to control two different armies at the same time as they both fight the other two armies in a race to the finish. I find this to be a rather interesting idea if not an ill-conceived one. Making the mental switch between Eldar and Imperial Guard or Ork and Chaos was a lot more difficult than I would have originally thought. By clicking an icon, you switch to that army, its units, and its buildings. You might be thinking: "Big deal! Now you got two armies instead of one, what’s the problem?" For one thing, your armies share resources with one another, so if you want any hope of beating the opponent, you can really only focus on one. Also, part of what makes this all so difficult is the fact that the armies are competing against one another. Thus if either army gets too close to the other, they actually start attacking each other and hurting your own chances for success. This is a rare instance where you can destroy your own armies.

While cool in concept, this feels almost pointless because I figured the best I could do to help myself in this instance was to take the army I cared less about and send them directly into enemy lines with the hopes of weakening them by the time my main army got there. When I played as the Imperial Guard, they had to move with a particular group of individuals and protect them through the map till they got to the exit. This only took me one try because it was mostly just a matter of having enough guys protect the convoy until reaching the end while sacrificing the useless Eldar for the greater good by throwing them at the enemies.

While playing as the Chaos and Ork, however, the mission was made more difficult because of that particular convoy. Since the Imperial Guard convoy was still part of the mission, it was essentially a time limit. Now, I had to make it to the end or destroy the convoy before it got there in order to succeed. This was easier said than done, as they had an insurmountable number of units and bases scattered around the map, and the convoy itself was incredibly powerful. It was also irritating that the starting resources for both Chaos and Ork armies were so low that in order to amass any sort of force that could do anything, I couldn't afford to spend any time with both armies.

With the time limit forcing my hand, and the fact that the path to the exit changed with the convoy's movements, I had to use some unorthodox tactics to win. It basically came down to throwing everything I had at the convoy immediately to halt its movement, then earning up enough resources to just put as many guys as I could into armored vehicles and sending them deep through enemy territory all the way to the end of the map, whereupon the armored transport blew up and everyone inside was sent flying all over the place. Some of those lucky airborne made it through the gate before they died and secured me a victory. The victory was immensely satisfying as a result, like when I completed a difficult section in a Dark Souls game for the first time, but what a trial that was.

Story

As I mentioned earlier, as soon as you select the single-player campaign, you're given the option to play one of two storylines. I ended up playing both, expecting one big story to be flushed out between the two. As it turns out, it really is just a choice. The events in one campaign negate those in another. There is a difference in goals and missions, so you aren't just repeating the same campaign with different armies, at least in the beginning. In the end, however, the last two missions for either side ended up being the same goal. That's from what I could tell, anyway; it gets complicated.

Order Campaign

In the Order campaign, you play as the Imperial Guard, under the command of General Sturnn. The Imperial Guard is attacking the frozen world of Lorn V, which has, up to this point, been under the control of Chaos Space Marines. Recently, there has been a surge of Orks making their way into the fray as well. The Guard are outnumbered and outmatched. Destined to keep throwing themselves against the brick wall of Chaos might until there are no soldiers left, they have the stubbornness of humanity in the Warhammer universe that makes everything so much fun. There is a reason for their stubbornness in this case, though. The reason they refuse to give up is because a titan resides on the planet. Titans were monumental weapons used 10,000 years ago by the Emperor and his soldiers to conquer worlds, and while the technology to build them was lost, those recovered are still immensely powerful.

The Guard must reclaim this legendary weapon of overwhelming power before the Chaos discover it, or the Orks destroy it, but they're outnumbered and outgunned. The Eldar, their motivations unclear at first, assist the humans from behind enemy lines for the first few missions. Using small strike teams, the Eldar attack the Chaos and Orks in there where they least expect it, allowing the humans to advance.

As the game progresses and the stakes are raised, the Eldar form an alliance with the humans, which is over as soon as it begins. This then leads to the infamous level where you can control multiple armies at once as everyone makes a mad dash for the end of the map. In addition to the forgotten titan on the planet, there is also a massive colony of sleeping Necrons: an ancient army of untold power. Immortal cyborgs from eons past, the Necrons, are waking up on the planet and will destroy them all if the Eldar do not get their ancient weapon to defend them. This happens to be beyond the forcefield gates that contain the Titan. Ever the stubborn xenophobes, the humans agree to help the Eldar until it is no longer advantageous, which is basically till the point where only one army can cross through the gates. You can probably guess which team I chose to win.

Disorder Campaign

The Disorder campaign follows the armies of the Orks and Chaos Marines. The Orks on the planet of Lorn V are a series of disjointed colonies fighting against one another. It's only when Warboss Goregutz (cool band) breaks through the colonies and demands allegiance, do they actually unite against their foes.

Meanwhile, Chaos Lord Crull is holding his ground against the newly united Orks and striking at the Imperial Guard, in an attempt to find out what their motivations are for coming here. Once he discovers they're after a Titan on a planet—because for some reason he didn't know there was one here already, having been ruling it for who-knows-how-long—he becomes obsessed with finding it and taking control. To do so requires lots and lots of sacrifices to their Blood God. Fortunately, there are plenty of Imperial Guard for that purpose.

Presentation

Winter Assault is only an expansion pack to the original Dawn of War, so it's not going to bump up the presentation much. The music is the same as before, and the level of detail is the same. One significant change was the smart decision not to zoom in so far on the character's face while dialogue is exchanged in a cut-scene, at least, not as often. Now we don't have to get such a good look at the flapping lips of a sea bass while the characters talk. Instead, the camera is usually at a distance, and text is just displayed on the screen instead.

The voice acting is improved from the original Dawn of War, or at least, they have fewer amateurs providing their voices. Chaos Lord Crull is over the top and can become a little annoying when you have to listen to a dude who is so angry all the time shouting about Eldar or Orks for one reason or another. However, I'd be quite entertained listening to him dictate menial or common things in our society, like announcing students at a graduation ceremony or shouting out the dumb drink names at a Starbucks.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Winter Assault is a passable expansion to a great game. It adds some unique experiences and mechanics to the gameplay and forces players to try out the different armies available, adding some variety to the single-player campaign. The massive difficulty spikes add some excitement and challenge to the experience, but some frustration as well. Unfortunately, even though the total number of missions across the two campaigns is the same as it was in the original Dawn of War, Winter Assault's single-player game feels short by comparison. All in all, I didn't love it, but I still had fun and it was still worth playing.