Dawn of War

Dawn of War is a testament to what can be so great about real-time strategy, and it captures the grim and brutal world of Warhammer 40,000 extremely well. Apart from the original there are 3 expansions (Winter Assault, Dark Crusade & Soulstorm) it will bring you from the basic 4 to a total of 9 playable races. They are as follows:

Space Marines
Imperial Guard
Sisters of Battle


Space Marine Assault Termies

Chaos Marines
Orks
Dark Eldar


Chaos Obliterators

Necrons
Eldar
Tau


Tau Battlesuits

Unlike most other RTS games The Dawn of war series revolves more around the combat than the resource gathering. There are only 2 resources; Power(gathered by building power generators) and requisition (gathered by your combat troops capturing critical locations, relics and strategic points)but there is still enough micro managing to keep the rts geeks happy.

The single player campaigns are very good with them being story driven campaigns for the first 2 games with the second 2 games having a more typical RTS "Capture all the locations on the map" type campaign. But with the added feature of being able to upgrade your general with various pieces of wargear that you gain by compleating various tasks (winning 5 games, having a 3-1 kill ratio, winning 3 defences, etc)

The computer AI is challanging enough so that all level of players will find it enjoying, although the jump from one level to the next is quite significant in my opinion. I can beat 7 computer players at "EASY" level without too much trouble but can sometimes struggle to beat 1 Standard level opponent. There are pleanty of maps to keep you entertained through either skirmishes vs the computer or vs your friends on the multi player.

All in all it is a very enjoyable series of games with hours and hours of playability. So weather you are a fan of 40K or a fan of RTS type games (OR both like me) I would highly reccomend them.

Till next time

KD

PS: I would also highly Reccomend the Dawn of War books by C.S Goto published by Black Library. The first of which is the story of the first games campaign.