Summary

I am a fan of real-time strategy (RTS) games and have played most of the major ones that have come out over the past several years, such as Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Warcraft, and Rise of Nations. However, there is something very special about this one. Most RTS games have you sparring with your opponent(s) until one of you gets knocked out or assimilated. Not with W40K: Dawn of War. It's non-stop kicks in the groin until one of you doubles over and then gets decapitated with a buzzing chainsword. This is by far one of the most graphic games I've ever played. It gives you a front-row seat to an all-out brutal spectacle of carnage and savagery. The game is at once cute, entertaining, dark, grim, and horrifying. Rarely does a match last over 45 minutes and most are over (at least the single-player matches) in 30 minutes or less. It's heart-pumping, adrenaline-rushing action from start to finish--and it's great the whole time. Overall, DoW is very well put together and should be in the collection of any strategy gamer. Overall Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Sound

Very good voice acting (except for the Chaos side), well-done music, and the sound effects are perfect. There are a lot of little sound bites in the game that are witty and dark at the same time. I have no real complaints in this area, except the Chaos forces sound a bit too whiny.

Gameplay

W40K is much like other RTS games in which you build buildings which produce units which seize territory and kill enemy units. However, all of the collecting of resources has been nicely steamlined. Instead of hoarding the usual food, gold, timber, stone, and so forth, you seize strategic points and build plasma generators. That's it! Your peons are used only for building and repair, no collecting. Thus, the game allows you to concentrate much more on battlefield strategy. And believe me, you'll need to. Unlike Age of Empires or Rise of Nations in which national borders or walls can protect you for a while from your foes, your enemies in this game often stop by within the first 30-60 seconds of gameplay. And they don't send a nice welcoming committee either. The gameplay is visceral, bloody, and furious from then on. You absolutely can't win without capturing strategic points and to do this means that you have to always be expanding. Of course, this means that you are always at war. Thankfully, each of the four sides that you can play are all designed for war. The space marines (my personal favorites) are the human faction. They are tough and well-rounded and fight well in close quarters and at a distance. The Chaos marines are an evil version (but not a duplicate) of the space marines and employ demons and dark magic, as well as a good mix of infantry and artillery. The Orks lust for war and often attempt to wipe out enemies by their sheer numbers. The Eldars are a very advanced race of aliens who specialize in various military tactics and have teleportation abilities. Overall, the races seem pretty balanced with the 1.3 patch, though I have only played single-player games and always play with the space marines. The single-player campaign has 11 missions, and it is quite good. However, I wish the game had shipped with one or two more campaigns. Fortunately, there is a good variety of maps which come with the game (and the patches included a few more), which should keep both solo players like me as well as the online crowd happy for a while. Also, you can download maps and other mods from the dawnofwargame.com website. You can also replay recorded games to see how the computer plays. This will probably be worthwhile to some gamers, since the computer plays very well on the standard and hard difficult levels and is probably near impossible to beat on the insane difficulty setting (which I haven't tried yet).