DAWN OF WAR III REVIEW
Leif Johnson reviews the long-awaited return of Relic’s real-time strategy game.
Outlandish swagger seeps through every pixel of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, and I can’t help but sit back and admire it for what it is. 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 greatest heroes is a guy wielding a big frickin’ hammer.
And oh, how he uses it. That man is Gabriel Angelos, commander of the Blood Ravens Space Marines, and he leaps into piles of Orks and sends them flying as effectively as booting a Lego Death Star into pieces. I press another hotkey and his hammer swings 360 degrees, causing Ork blood and guts to splatter the turf and walls in gruesome imitation of Jackson Pollock. I may have grown weary of other elements in the latest entry in Relic Entertainment’s long-running real-time strategy franchise, but from start to finish I admired the gusto of its presentation.
DawnofWarIII is all about recapturing that classic real-time strategy excitement. Much of the time it succeeds. It accomplishes it not only with larger-than-life Elite units like Gabriel, but also by stuffing in massive screen-hogging armies, limited base-building and squabbles over resource nodes. 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 DawnofWarII so exciting, but nothing shines so brightly in this new dawn as the emphasis on unrelenting, aggressive action. What DawnofWar lacks in creative scenarios it makes up for in intensity, to the point that I rarely found myself bored in both multiplayer and the campaign.
Stale Tale
With a better story, DawnofWarIII may have even been magnificent. It certainly has the ingredients on hand—a dash of old, favorite characters like the Eldar’s Farseer Macha and a crunchy pinch of the Orkish warboss Gorgutz ’Ead ’Unter—but it squanders it on an unappetising tale about the humans, Orks, and Eldar (space elves) brutally bickering over a mysterious spear and some business about a runaway planet. There’s war! There’s betrayal! Wacky alliances emerge! In other words, well, it’s essentially Warhammer 40K as usual.
The big difference this time around is that DawnofWarIII lets you play all three factions in the 17-mission campaign rather than limiting yourself to the Space Marines. Each bunch feels distinct, and I found experimenting with each one of the greatest joys DawnofWar has to offer. The Space Marines may be a straightforward lot with swords and guns, but they march down that straight path with panache, mowing down Orks and Eldar with hulking mechs or smashing through walls of green flesh with Gabriel’s big hammer. The Eldar, though, 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 it’s the Orks that steal the show. They can upgrade themselves with the scrap from ruined buildings littering the field, and every one of their ramshackle structures invites admiration. Nothing sets them apart quite like their WAAAGH Towers, though, which look like things that might be loaded on Mad Max: Fury Road’s Doof Wagon and which pump thumping heavy metal out to the green hordes around them. Activate one—hell, activate five of them—and the music intensifies until the surrounding Orks revel in a savage ecstasy, gaining enough attack boosts and speed to seriously knock some hurt into anyone who comes near. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt such a satisfying buildup in an RTS.
It can get tough to see all these units in action, particularly when the screen floods with little green men (that do drag the framerate down to around 40 frames per second or so), 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 heavy fire and need to be directed over to a health boost. They also make it easy to tell which units need to be upgraded, as the icon changes once the upgrade is in place to reflect the newer look.
Such variety. Such potential. But for all of the creativity that went into making each faction feel distinct, only
With a better story, Dawn of War III may have even been magnificent
a little made it into the maps themselves. A fairly typical mission might see me stepping into the clanky shoes of an Elite, like Gorgutz, and directing my guys to muscle their way from one point to another, smashing whatever objective was there and capturing resource nodes throughout the map. I’d then set up a few base buildings, such as barracks and an advanced vehicle shop, and then take the battle to whoever was on the other side. And that, sadly, would usually be that.
The lack of creativity fortunately doesn’t mean a lack of content. At least the missions are long, with the objectives neatly scattered. It took perhaps half an hour to plow through the shortest one, and the longest one took a couple of hours out of me. But the pacing isn’t always perfect. Even on some of the most intense maps, I still found myself in plenty of situations where I’d end up waiting quietly and awkwardly for resources to pick back up so I could enter some more units into the queue. Worse, at least as far as believable strategy is concerned, in almost every one of these vulnerable cases the enemy showed next to zero interest in taking me out. Cover might as well not exist at all. Sure, you’ll find a couple of circular areas with destructible shields across the map, but the battles rarely seem to take place near them.
For better or for worse, it’s usually safe to expect a dull campaign from a real-time strategy game. After all, the joke-that’s-not-a-joke goes that they’re really only meant as lengthy tutorials for the multiplayer mode, and that’s true here. The catch? DawnofWarIII 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 faction every mission. I started off with humans, but one mission later I was turning up my nose along with the Eldar. Another mission went by and I was shouting, ‘WAAAGH!’ with the Orks—that was my favorite. And then it’s back to ‘hey, humies’ all over again.
Stomaching this kind of thing might have been easier if the factions played a little more similarly to one another (which would bring its own set of problems), but the factions play so differently that it’s tough to get the hang of micromanaging the upgrades for squads, the specific abilities for three elite heroes and their grunt units, and the queues for specific buildings. Just as I’m getting comfortable with the tactics that are associated with a certain faction, I’m asked to step into another. The narrative suffers a little as a result as well—this is mainly because the disjointed story does little to foster the cohesion that comes from a focus on one faction.
Sometimes, though, the spectacle of its set pieces kept my attention. I wish there had been more. Early on, for instance, the Orks cobble together a big gun in an inconvenient spot and then realise moving it might pose a few problems. They realize after the first shot that the gun has a massive kickback, so the latter part of the mission hinges of the Orks fighting off Eldar as they warm it up and fire it toward the next point on the map. DawnofWarIII also revels in the beauty of carnage. Forums and Subreddits leading up to the official launch crawled with complaints that it looked too ‘cartoony’, but the graphical approach here generally works well in action. Dawnof WarIII unfortunately doesn’t let you zoom in for detail as far as Dawnof WarII, but from afar the flashy animations for Elites make it easy to find them in the flood of fighters.
Gods Among Men
Elites are the mighty hero units that dominate both DawnofWarIII’s visuals and its gameplay. A specter of Warcraft III heroes looms over their presence, to the point that Gabriel himself—standing twice the size of his fellow men and toting a two-handed mallet—could be sculpted into a modern-day model for Arthas Menethil with little effort. He leaps into battle with arcs perhaps better suited to comic books than grimdark sci-fi and his voice actor clearly enjoy yelling out his goofy, noble lines with weighty conviction—sound design as a whole is a great strength throughout. I admire the surprising variety in both appearance and abilities in all of them. Some, like Farseer Macha, who tosses her spear across the map and unleashes telekinetic blasts, are fairly simple. My personal favorite is likely the Orks’ Beauty da Morkanaut, a building-sized walking metal effigy of the Ork god Mork that lumbers through the battlefield taking on
The lack of creativity fortunately doesn’t mean a lack of content
entire armies on its own with its devastating ‘Rockit Fists’ and ‘Kustom Force Shield.’’
They’re like unstoppable gods on the battlefield, and I can’t shake the feeling that they’re too powerful. That’s not to say that they’re immortal, though, as you could take down a melee-focused Elite, such as Gabriel, with some smart positioning of snipers and other ranged units. And to be fair, taking one of the giants down is one of the great thrills of the game.
But there’s a good chance Gabriel could just jump into that pile of snipers and scatter them anyway. I normally get the most satisfaction from real-time strategy games by lining up a smart succession of grunts troops, but such meticulous efforts come off as a waste of time here when Elites crush your armies within seconds. Elites technically can’t even die. You first summon Elites of varying power by building Elite points from passive play (Da Morkanaut takes a hefty nine), but after they fall, you only need to wait out a short timer before you can set them to wreaking havoc again. They’re so essential to the strategy, in fact, that in the multiplayer maps I’d see players just turtling around their base until they had enough points to throw an elite into the field. I can’t even say I blame them.
You also gain ‘Skull’ currency by levelling Elites through the campaign, but that levelling unfolds at a glacial pace. Skulls allow you to buy new ‘Doctrines’ for your elites, such as one that heals all the troops around Gabriel when he falls in battle. You’re clearly meant to build up most Skull points through the multiplayer mode, as a fully-unlocked stable of abilities allows for loadouts that give you significant edges over your opponents.
Fight It Out
And what about that multiplayer mode anyway? And, unfortunately for now, there is just the one and it only comes with eight different maps. It, too, harks back to real-time strategy’s good old days of building bases, scrounging frantically for resources, and slapping armies of humans, Orks, and elves together into a giant, scrappy pile in three-onthree, two-versus-two, or head-tohead modes.
But there are more distinctly modern elements here, too. The battles aren’t really about destroying bases. Instead, they’re about taking down ‘Power Cores’, but not before first taking out sets of shield generators and turrets. In short, DawnofWarIII’s multiplayer mode looks a lot like a multiplayer online battle arena in the vein of Leagueof Legends or Dota2.
I initially wasn’t much of a fan of the approach, but it’s grown on me. A bit, anyway. The presence of Elites and escalation timers mean that smart players are always on the offensive, trying to keep the elites and bay and trying to slap key enemy structures with permanent damage. Most of the best action takes place around resource nodes, as losing them can quickly cripple a faction beyond recovery. Playing defensively? You’re probably going to get a few nasty comments in chat from your teammates for not helping out. I’ve grown to love the associated energy, except perhaps when they devolve into what looks like pure chaos in the three-on-three mode.
Still, I’m convinced the Elites make the battles go on far longer than they should. You can spend several minutes building a smart selection of troops, but they’re little more than wheat before the thresher when an Elite stomps on the screen. Elites dominate the field so thoroughly that I’ve sometimes seen matches devolve into two Elites just swatting each other in the middle of the field, their armies dead all around them. It’s in these moments that they most resemble a MOBA’s hero units, and the look isn’t always flattering.
Other flaws pepper the experience, too, whether it’s the absence of autosaves during the long campaign missions or the mind-boggling inability to reassign keybinds. For all this, I can’t say I wasn’t usually having fun. I admire DawnofWarIII for trying to reinvent its formula again. It isn’t quite the pure RTS of the first game or the RPG experiment of the second, but it sits somewhere in between. 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.
I’m convinced Elites make the battles go on far longer than they should