The graphics in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War are top-notch for the genre, no doubt about that. The polygon count is high, the textures are sharp and the animations are really good. There is no lack of extra features either, you got an army painter in which you can make your own color theme and custom badges for your army, which your multiplayer opponents can also see. Relic will also be releasing a map editor, which was originally intended to be included on the CDs, but sadly did not make it in the final release candidate. When you start up the game and watch the intro, and to the point where you jump in-game, the game feels and looks like the Warhammer universe. The sound in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War has a good quality, but it has also some problems. A couple of the races has some bad A.I. barks, such as the Eldar, which are rather annoying to hear when you control them. In the single-player campaign, you can clearly see that Relic has been too lazy to make any synchronized voice-animations. Finally, a lot of the characters in the single-player campaign seem to talk with a british accents, which seems out of time and place. All these drawbacks in the sound departement are really minor and do not affect the value of the gameplay or how much fun you might have playing it. The gameplay in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War has some issues. First of all, there is only one possible strategy you can use to win, and that is to rush your opponent, and keep on building as many units as possible constantly and pour them at your enemy. This is the only possible thing you can do in order to win a game, there is no other way. If you attack a unit from behind, from the side, or from the front makes no difference in this game, so trying to ambush your opponent does not have an impact on his army. The gameplay mechanisms in this game is built so that all you have to do is to keep on building units and send them out on the battlefield. So much for the strategical possibilities in this game. You might think that since the game has four races, there will be plenty of variety in terms of gameplay. Sadly, each race has very few units and some of those units look very similar to each other. Most of the units in the four races have also been built to do the same things, for example infantry or vehicles doing either melee combat or ranged combat, or artillery vehicles. If you plan on playing against the A.I. by skirmishing either alone or against your friends, you might find the difficulty level to be a problem in this game. The "Standard" difficulty level is too easy, and if you are for example playing with two other friends against three computers, you will have no problem with beating the A.I. on this difficulty level. If you move up to the "Hard" difficulty level it becomes impossible to win the game, and it makes you wonder why Relic even bothered implementing a "Harder" and an "Insane" difficulty level. They should rather make a difficulty level between "Standard" and "Hard". Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is using a rather successfull recipe in the RTS genre which goes all the way back to the first real-time strategy game on the computer. If you like seeing fast battles with lots of eyecandy and gameplay with little strategical content, this game is the right kind of game for you. However, more experienced gamers or gamers that crave for more strategy in the genre will feel that there are things missing in this game, such as strategy and a variety of content.
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I'm not writing your average review for Dawn of War because by the time I got around to writing this you could have already read 20 other different reviews giving you all the technical information about the game you can ... Read Full Review
Okay, as soon as you start up the game, you are hit by the coolest movie ever of a battle between the Space Marines and the Orks. Its bloody amazing!, everytime i start up the game, i watch it. And the actual games is ju... Read Full Review
