Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Winter Assault (PC)

A new Dawn for Relic

Relic are one of those companies that continually set out to improve their products and refine the genre they’re currently working on. When they created Dawn of War for the PC they slammed into the RTS market with a big ball and chain and took no prisoners, creating a massively fun and enjoyable game – albeit with a short Singleplayer Campaign and some minor glitches, which they soon sorted out with a few patches.

DoW was extremely successful and managed to net a 9.0 from us in a previous review, which can be found here: Dawn of War review

Well, a lot has changed for DoW since it was first reviewed and now we enter the realms of the expansion pack.

Dawn of War: Winter Assault: Story

Rather than focussing on the Battle Brothers (The Space Marines) for this jaunt into the SP story, the developers have gone for a different approach – this time around you can play the greatly extended SP story as the forces of Order or Disorder: Imperial Guard and Eldar or the Orks and Chaos.

The story takes place on a frozen spitball of a planet that the Emperor wants taken back from the Orks and Chaos that have overrun it, but it is not going to be easy. There’s a large war-machine that the Empire desires but between them and it are the forces of Chaos and the cruel, vicious Orks.

Enter the Imperial Guard; mankind’s’ answer to the unemployment problems of the future. There are literally thousands of them all willing to die for the Empire, all human and when a hundred die they can always get a hundred more from a backwater planet.

I won’t say any more about the actual story as it twists and turns as the game progresses, and this time it’s a longer campaign and definitely more fun.

What’s new?

The most recent patch of DoW has made improvements to the old game and engine by leaps and bounds, the gameplay has however not altered and the game is just as easy/interesting to play. Of course the balancing of units has meant that the developers have altered some things that players have found not to their liking, such as the Chaos forces power levels being trimmed, costs being changed and their ability to have Rocket Marines etc removed.

They call it balancing; this however is a fine tightrope to walk since if you listen to your fanbase too much, you’ll get conflicting ideas from everyone. Some people like the lack of Chaos’ ability to add Rockets to their squads (apart from Chaos players) and so on.