Dawn of War III
PC | $89 | WWW.DAWNOFWAR.COM Relic goes back to the basics (and bases).
We can’t help but sit back and admire Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III’s outlandish swagger. Here, we find ourselves in a futuristic world so advanced that people flit about in spacecraft as easily as we take the bus, and yet despite all of the cybernetics and high-tech weaponry, one of its great heroes is a guy wielding a big frickin’ hammer.
DoW III is all about recapturing that classic realtime strategy excitement. Much of the time, it succeeds. Some good elements from the past get lost in the process, such as the cover system and Diablo- style loot hunts that helped make 2009’s DoW II so exciting, but nothing shines so brightly in this new outing as the unrelenting action.
With a better story, it may have been magnificent. It certainly has the ingredients on hand — a dash of old, favourite characters like the Eldar’s Farseer Macha and the Orkish warboss Gorgutz ’Ead ’Unter — but the game squanders it on a tale about the races brutally bickering over a mysterious spear and some business about a runaway planet.
The big difference this time around is that III lets you play all three factions in the 17-mission campaign rather than limiting yourself to the Space Marines, which was one of the greatest joys this game has to offer.
Each race is distinct. The Marines are a straightforward lot with swords and guns, but they march with panache, mowing down Orks and Eldar with hulking mechs or Gabriel’s hammer. The Eldar are a band apart. Lithe and lean, they dart across the battlefield with rechargeable shields and an emphasis on strike-and-run tactics, and they can teleport almost all of their base’s structures across the field rather than build a new one. But the Orks can upgrade themselves with the scrap from ruined buildings, and their ramshackle structures invites admiration. Nothing sets them apart quite like their WAAAGH Towers, though, which look like they might be loaded on Mad Max: Fury Road’s Doof Wagon and which pump out heavy metal to the green hordes.
Forums leading up to the official launch crawled with complaints that it looked too ‘cartoony’, but the graphical approach here generally works well in action.
It can get tough to see all these units in action, particularly when the screen floods with little green men, but the intuitive user interface usually smooths out any potential issues. Every squad that’s either in the field or being prepared gets its own little square at the bottom of the screen, making it easy to keep track of which ones are taking fire.
It’s usually safe to expect a dull campaign from an RTS game. The joke-that’s-not-ajoke goes that they’re really only meant as tutorials for the multiplayer, and that’s true here. The catch? Dawn of War III does a shoddy job of it. Rather than sending you through multiple missions at a time with a single faction, Relic passes you off to a different one every mission. Just as we’re getting comfy with one group’s tactics, we’re asked to move to another.
We admire DoW III for trying to reinvent its formula again. In its finest moments, when armies are crawling over each other and mechs make the ground tremble, it’s a rather exciting place to be.
Leif Johnson