Warhammer 40,000 - Dawn of War: The Dark Crusade
Warhammer 40,000 - Dawn of War: The Dark Crusade
Finally after probably one of the most fun gaming experiences I've had in a long time Warhammer 40,000 - Dawn of War Platinum Edition comes to an end (sadly). I just finished playing through the campaign and exploring the little tid bits of the second expansion: The Dark Crusade - and I must say....I'm quite impressed! This mere expansion very well outdoes even the original game.
Review:
As with Winter Assault there's really no point in going through all the categories again and saying the same thing yeah? Well anyway the graphics are about on the same level - obviously with new races, new weapons, and such comes new visual effects. In other words more explosions, lasers, and fire will fill up your screen. The model and unit details seem to be a little bit improved over the last two games though...
As with any RTS expansion DC comes with new units for each race, but what DC's greatest addition to the Dawn of War series is is the inclusion of two new, in-depth, races (the Tau Empire and the Necrons) and the total reworking of the game's campaign.
Both the Tau and the Necrons are powerful races that are both fun to play as and are totally unique to the other races of the game. This gives DC a grand total of 7 playable races - each with their own units, buildings, strategies, and feel to them.
I feel the campaign needs to be talked about in a lengthy way so here we go...
The Campaign -
The new campaign layout is probably one of the greatest additions to the Dawn of War series, and is most likely one of the most fun ways to play an RTS of this caliber.
Rather than introduce the player to an already in motion story with set characters and such, DC instead lays out the background of what's going on and tells you to make the rest up as you go. Instead of advancing through a set number of missions till the end of the game DC gives you a campaign map of the planet Kronus. It also gives you the choice of picking between all seven races (Space Marines, Imperium, Tau, Necrons, Chaos, Orks, Eldar) and each race has its own main character that will lead your army.
On the campaign map there are a grand total of 25 provinces - each race starts in their own beginning territories called "strongholds" and can move their armies about the map conquering bordering territories to add to their conquest in a turn base style. When you attack a province a skirmish map will open up and you'll basically play a skirmish round against your given enemy (obj = destroy their HQ). Although sometimes this is not the case and you'll play a mission style round - this usually happens when you attack either extremely valuable provinces or enemy strongholds.
Your army is made up of your main character and his "honor guard". Honor guard are champion units that can either be purchased (with a turn based addition of requisition) or earned through conquering certain provinces. When a skirmish map opens up you'll start with your leader and his honor guard plus an HQ and a builder unit...this changes though when you conquer the province that lets you establish a forward base - before battles you can use requisition to buy buildings and such that will already be there when the game starts.
There are no unit or building restrictions in the campaign (like in the linear campaigns of the first two games) so anything and everything is game. Your basically free to do and make whatever you want as long as you either destroy your enemies HQ or yours gets destroyed.
Besides attacking, you'll also have to defend your provinces against attacking enemies. This is done in the same skirmish way only you wont have your army and leader but rather whatever reinforcements you have in that province. On any given turn you can choose to reinforce your provinces with units in return for requisition - making them harder to take for the enemy. But, defending is something you don't need to be worried about too much on the easier difficulty levels.
Throughout the campaign you'll earn not only honor guard units and special province abilities but also "wargear". Wargear allows you to upgrade the loadout of your leader - adding armor, weapons, and such to him to make him more powerful. Each leader has maybe...10 items of wargear that are unlocked by achieving objectives throughout the campaign (i.e. killing 2000 enemies, conquering 3 races, winning 5 conquests, etc).
With 25 provinces and 7 races playing in a turn based way the campaign to take Kronus can take 25+ skirmish rounds to finally win. All in all playing as the Chaos on the campaign it took me from July 3rd to this morning (July 8th) playing a good 2 hours a day to finally beat the campaign on easy.
This lengthy campaign provides much satisfaction and the fact that there are still 6 other races to play as only further increases the amount of time you can put into this game and the replay value skyrockets.
As you can see the campaign itself earns the game a perfect score for gameplay as well as the replay value - this is really great news for DC and those wishing to play it.
Another little thing of interest is that DC is a standalone expansion - in other words it does not need the original Dawn of War to play. Truthfully I don't know who in their right minds would just buy DC and not either of the two past games but it seems as though the only restriction to this standalone expansion is the online play - without the key codes for Dawn of War and Winter Assault a player cannot play as the Orks, Space Marines, Chaos, Eldar, and Imperium in online skirmishes. Yet - they can play as these races in the campaign and skirmish modes.
Graphics = 9/10
Gameplay = 10/10
Audio = 4/5
Replay Value = 5/5
Story/Plot = 8/10
Conclusion:
What can I really say about the Dawn of War series I haven't said before? It's an amazing series of games and if you're a sci-fi RTS lover or just an RTS lover in general this is your golden chalice, this is your holy grail...Dawn of War is probably one of the most sophisticated, detailed, and plainly fun as hell RTS games out on the market right now (and it's cheap!).
I can say that buying the Platinum Edition of Dawn of War was one of the best investments and one of the best uses of my hard earned money (all 30 bucks of it) in a very long time.
I'm very much looking forward to either another expansion type DoW game or maybe even a DoW 2 in the near future - I can't imagine why of all things this series would simply stop.
Final Score = 36/40 or 90%
Originally Posted by VOP2288
