A "so-what" expansion pack with bad level design.
User Rating: 6.5 | Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Winter Assault PC
Get this pack if you can't live without playing Dawn of War with all of the available races. As far as adding any quality content to Dawn of War you may be sorely disappointed, especially as far as the single player game is concerned. In Winter Assault the Imperial guard are introduced as a playable faction as opposed to just being a bit-player in missions, as they were in Dawn of War. The Imperial Guard are the mall-cops of the Warhammer 40k universe. They have the poorest armed basic troops in the game and they absorb punishment like wet Kleen-Ex. They attempt to make up for this by having the best mobile armor in the later stages of gameplay and are meant to be played defensively. Every mission that you are stuck with these guys is a grind as they emulate the doughboys of WWI in their tactics, including the tactic of trench warfare by way of bunker-hoping through underground tunnels (which actually uses the Eldar's teleportation and renames it). The guardsmen have to inch their way along, lacking any close combat skills, and die by the dozen just trying to accomplish the most basic of RTS tasks. Taking checkpoints, establishing a new base, gathering power or requisition points are all daunting tasks for the Imperial Guard... it's no wonder they engineered the Space Marines to do the real fighting in the Imperium, sheesh!
What really killed this expansion pack for me was the cheap level design in the single-player campaign. The old RTS formula of denying you the most logical units for a given situation is used here to it's diabolical fullest. Need an armored personnel carrier to get by some gun encampments? Too bad. Need access to your anti-armor units? Sucks to be you. This makes the single-player campaign take three times as long to finish, covering up the fact that there are only a dozen new levels and only one new unit for each faction. The single-player campaign has more depth than Dawn of War's, but at the expense of gameplay and at the end of the day games are supposed to be fun and not work. Winter Assault is just too much of a grind.
