Warhammer 40,000 is popularly known as a table top game manufactured by a company called "Games Workshop." If you collect anything, you've probably heard of it. It's a very expensive game to play, with a pack of soldiers costing the price of a used video game. However, the new real-time strategy game is just as great as the table top game itself. Though the rest of Warhammer's games weren't the best in the world, it's good to see that Dawn of War is truly a contender. Dawn of War puts you in mankind's dark future 40,000 years from now. War stains the land, and many alien races have been discovered. All are hostile. This is exactly why Warhammer is so fun...the war never stops. It's literally never been so fun to wage war in the future. (Yes, this game is quite possibly up there with Starcraft.) The game has a very basic resource system. Instead of using peons to gather your resources for you, you get your soldiers to go around and capture strategic points all around the map. The more strategic points you control, the faster your reqisition rate will increase. There is also a second resource in the game, too: energy. You need to build your own Power Generators instead of capturing them. Once again, the more you have the faster your energy piles up. Some strategic points can be controlled by the opposition, and can even be taken over by the enemy. You can use troops or build a resource generator attached with an auto-cannon on top of the strategic point to guard it. You can also control relics, which allow you to access better units and research. Critical locations are also in the game, but are only useful in certain game types. Critical locations work the same as relics and strategic points, but you cannot build a resource generator on them as they do not provide resources. They will only work when you capture a set amount of them, which triggers an instant win countdown. The atmosphere of the game does take place in the battleground world of the future, so dust and torn down buildings add to it. You can also take cover inside craters, old buildings and shrubry, and recieve a negative cover weakness when in negative cover such as a murky, knee-deep swamp. The races and units are greatly detailed. You can even zoom in on the action and rotate the camera to your liking using the mouse and the alt key. This is a great treat, but since the game is very fast-paced you don't get the chance to do this much. It is very fast-paced...you almost never find yourself doing nothing! You're always reinforcing your squads with extra team-mates, buying your units special weapons like flamers, rocket launchers, sniper rifles and heavy bolter machine guns, capturing, expanding your base or building new things to access Tier 3 units. The game also lets the player access super units with specific abilities. For example, the Chaos legion summons the daemon called "Bloodthirster" to level bases in seconds. Of course, you can only use one at a time, and they are very expensive. The Bloodthirster in peticular takes damage when not in combat, so summoning it in battle is a must! There are also many other powerful creatures, specifically the Orks' special units, but I won't spoil them for you just yet. The Space Marines lack one of these super creatures, however. They prefer a direct power-in-numbers approach, using the powerful Terminator squads in vast numbers to drive your opponent insane. Single player, as fun as it is, is not as good as multiplayer. There you can compete with everybody who has the game around the world. Single player puts you on the role of the Space Marines called the "Blood Ravens." Though it is not solid, and only has 13 missions that seem to fly right by, it is still some fun. If you've played RTS game for quite a while, I recommend the "hard" difficulty challenge. If you're new, go with "normal." Easy...well, I'll put it this way: easy is way, way, way too easy. Even a beginner could whoop a computer opponent on easy mode. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is an amazing game, graphically, gameplay wise and everything else. I expect to see it as a contender for RTS of the year. It is always fun and never gets old. Even the "Army Painter" option allows you to paint your units specific colors, and making you a whole new army for one of the races. Though the game does not come with a map editor, the game's developers plan to release one later in the year. I hope that this game will one day be up there with Starcraft an Warcraft, because heck, it deserves it like none other. That's why it deserved the 10/10 I gave it.
Other Helpful Reviews for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
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
