A new dawn is rising... (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (PC))

Member Name: Rocketeer007

Product:	Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (PC)
Date:	26/10/08 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic game-play, amazing graphics

Disadvantages: Only one single player campaign

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is, to date, the best RTS game I have found. I have been a great fan of this genre since Dune 2 first came out on the PC, and have avidly collected and played games like this ever since.

Graphically, Dawn of War excels with amazing levels of unit detail and a massive range of animations. If you're a fan of painting model miniatures, you can even customise your army on the PC to some extent - if, like me, you have little or no artistic talent, there's a good range of pre-built colour schemes available.

The sound is pretty stunning too. Every unit has been carefully scripted with a range of responses and voice actors provide apt, funny and sometimes down-right scary vocals for each character in the game.

The gameplay is what sets this game apart. It uses a fairly simple resource model: Power and Requisition are all you need. Both are generated by structures, so there's no "harvesting" units to protect, letting you focus on the battle instead of defending your income.

Power is gained by building power generators, and used when building some units and buildings - there's no drain like in some other RTS games.

Requisition is gained by claiming important locations on the map. Each location captured provides a steady income, and the most common type can be enhanced with buildings that provide line-of-sight, defend the location from recapture, and enhance the resource production rate.

Orks have an additional resource, known as "Waargh!" This is generated by constructing certain structures, and provides both a resource for building units and increases the unit limit. Unlike any other race, the tech tree is advanced not just with new structures, but also by increasing the size of your army.

Due to the simplified resource structure, the base building part of the game is easily pushed to the back of your mind with no ill effect... letting you focus on the battles.

Here, again, Dawn of War is unique in my experience. Instead of building single units, you focus on squads, which can be upgraded and expanded once built. If a squad member is lost in battle, he can be replaced in the field - there's no need for the long (and often dangerous) journey from your base to the front-lines. This makes each squad far more valuable an asset, as even a 2 man squad can be salvaged and sent back into the fray.

The final gameplay enhancement is the addition of Morale for each squad. This has been done before, but never with such clear effect - a broken squad (one with low morale) will turn and run instead of fighting, and will fight far less effectively than one with full morale. Certain units - sergeants and the like - can restore the morale of a squad, and the impact is immediately obvious.

This game plays fantastically on my high end desktop gaming PC; but is still playable even on my cheap laptop with no gaming graphics card.

The only down-side is that the single player campaign only lets you play as one of the 4 available races, leaving a lot less single-player repeatability.

Summary: The best real time strategy game to date (buy the Anthology though!)