Hello, my name is UnCivilServant, and I have a problem with Plastic Crack – I simply don’t have enough time to assemble and paint the thousands of dollars worth of miniatures I’ve acquired. But that is not important right now. What’s important is that the latest entry in the long-running Warhammer 40k video game series Dawn of War has recently dropped. The first entry was released way back when I was still in college, and I own the whole set. It was the gateway by which I took up the tabletop game. Entries came out fairly regularly until Dawn of War II: Retribution. After which things went quiet, and the publisher THQ went bankrupt. Not because of Dawn of War, but because the people running the company were a bunch of gits.

For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer, here is a quick exposition dump of backstory. In the beginning, there was a company that made miniatures for fantasy roleplaying games. Citadel looked at their books and went “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of writing a ruleset to fight tabletop battles with their miniatures. And thus Warhammer Fantasy Battles was born. People who wanted to have bigger armies would have to buy more miniatures, and most of their existing stock could be worked into the product line. At some point around here, Citadel changed their name to Games Workshop but kept the brand for some of their products, like paint.

So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of “Let’s do more Warhammer, but IN SPACE!” And so Warhammer 40,000 was born. Being the eighties, there was a lot of cocaine-fueled insanity included, including outright rip-offs of other works given a new coat of Citadel paint, and it was good. Over the years they fed the Space Dwarfs to the Space Bugs and introduced the Space Weaboo Communists, but it developed an aesthetic distinct and yet familiar.

So they looked at their books and said: “We need to find a way to sell more miniatures.” Someone had the idea of licensing their totally original and not a shameless amalgam of ideas to these newfangled video game producers. After all, gamers were the same geeks who buy their main product lines, so there was money to be had. And if there is anything Games Workshop likes, it’s money. Dawn of War was not the first of these titles. But it is a contender for having the most entries. It depends on how you count expansions and DLCs.

Let’s get to talking about this particular entry.

I open it up and find out that the opening cinematic was used as the announcement trailer. Disappointing, but it’s still fun to watch an Imperial Knight knock a Wraithknight off its feet like a linebacker that took a wrong turn and broke a referee in half. And then it asks me to either sign in to or create a Relic account. Being an antisocial git, I refuse and see if there’s a way to ignore it. Fortunately, this proved to be optional, and it hasn’t asked me again. Finding out there was a tutorial, I decided to start there. I always play the tutorial missions as it gives me an idea of the developer’s attitudes. We start out telling some Blood Ravens to wander about.

After bossing around the generic, nameless tactical and scout marines for a bit, I get told to summon Gabriel Angelos to the battle. Gabe first appeared way back in the original Dawn of War. Where he proceeded to make an awful mess of things that the Imperial Guard had to come in and clean up. To be fair, he did try to make things right, but he got beat down by the mess he made. But since he was the last Captain left not interred in a Dreadnought or self-demoted to the chaplaincy, he became Chapter Master by default. Anyway, we teleport him in and he arrives wearing a shiny suit of Cataphractii armor – and he’s freaking huge! Now Cataphractii armor is bulky, but this is not Cataphractii big, he’s the size of an original XBox. Compare him to the regular tactical marines:

I mean his head is bigger than their helmets. He’s supposed to be able to wear that same armor.

I thought maybe this was part of the new visual direction for the game. Make the hero units bigger so they stand out. But here’s the Eldar hero:

She’s the same size as the rest of her people.

Maybe the artists Relic hired mistook Gabe for an Ork. Orks do allot authority by size, so it’s perfectly reasonable for Gorgutz to be three times the height of the boyz around him.

This Git – Gorgutz

Since I brought them up, let’s talk about the Space Elves and Space Orks. The Eldar are like politicians, they lie and change sides so much that no one trusts them. They’ve even been known to lie when the truth would have worked better. They also have a tendency to get eaten by a Chaos god after they die, so it evens out. The Orks are the exact opposite. They are direct – engineered for fighting they’re happy to fight anybody, including each other. There is one batch of Orks stuck on a Daemon world that gets resurrected each morning to fight an eternal battle against the native inhabitants. They’ve gone to Orky heaven.

A thousand words in and I now get to the game proper. Outside of the fact that Gabe is fuckoff huge and somehow able to make giant leaps in Cataphractii armor (a suit which in the tabletop has the special rule “Slow and Purposeful”), I haven’t yet really had much to complain about. The first real irritant was in finding that you get one active campaign at a time. To start from scratch you have to delete the existing one. But there is not much reason to do so, since you can replay levels at will, and your advances are independent of the campaign. Indeed you can even get them through skirmish and multiplayer games. This still irritates me. It means that if you have a computer shared between more than one person, they don’t get to keep separate save games and thus separate progress. I don’t personally have this problem now, but I remember when I did.

Anyway, on to the campaign. The next irritant is that it is only one unified campaign that rotates between factions. It had started with the cycle “Space Marine – Ork – Eldar” but on chapter seven, it skipped Space Marine and went to Ork. So I’m not even sure if there is a pattern. You can’t play just a Space Marine campaign or just and Ork campaign. The story bounces around between the factions and you have to play the other guys to unlock the next mission for your chosen group. Fortunately, it doesn’t pretend to be anything but linear. Despite being called a “Campaign Map” in the game, here is what pops up:

The units depicted change by which faction the selected mission is for.

Each of those flags is either a mission color coded to the faction or a cinematic. It’s not so bad since they admit it’s linear and don’t try to pretend otherwise. The interface remains consistently meh as we progress through the mission briefing to choosing which elite units we’ll be able to deploy.

I have no idea where this room is.

The screen is not terribly intuitive, and it took a while to figure out how to unlock the other elite options for each faction. Definitely a place for improvement. We’re finally to the gameplay proper. Base building is back, but there is a dearth of defensive turrets. And they screwed up the cover system. I didn’t want to complain about the bubble system, but there’s not even an in-game excuse for capturable cover locations. Earlier incarnations had dynamic cover systems where objects on the field could be used depending on where the enemy was. Now you have to capture a cover point, and it soaks up some incoming ranged damage. Anything else on the battlefield is just there to obstruct movement. Bolt shells will fly through it without a problem – for the shooter at least.

The basics are stock standard RTS mechanics, with the attempts to be “more tactical” in terms of unit special abilities. The problem is the actual fights degrade into blobs of combatants. Figuring out who was in the correct position to use a special ability tactically is not terribly straightforward, so it ends up being hero abilities and items like jump packs for mobility assists. Personally, I don’t take umbrage at it, as even in earlier iterations I found that problems went away when locally overwhelming numbers were applied to the enemy positions.

Why yes, I am an Imperial Guard player in tabletop 40k, why do you ask?

The story is well, no more or less deep than other Dawn of War titles. The voice acting is middle of the road to decent. The change in voice actors for Gabe from the previous game is the most noticeable. But it’s not that the new guy is doing anything wrong, he just doesn’t sound right. In all, the game is just all right. The worst thing I can say about it is that it was too easy to get up and walk away. There have been times where I’ve had to call into work on the day after a release because I got hooked and could not rip myself away. There was no risk of that here. Given the addictiveness of other entries, this is a bit of a letdown. A low mark in the franchise, but not beyond salvation.

I give it seven of ten skulls for the skull throne.