Originally released in 2004, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War was an important milestone in the growing popularity of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It was a major sales success, unusually for a real-time strategy game at a time when the genre had already started stagnating, and has been credited with helping boost the success of the Warhammer 40,000 setting, particularly in the United States, where it had previously been quite niche. The game was also hugely praised for its voice acting, graphics and particularly its characterful animations, with gory "finishing moves" for melee combat. Although I enjoyed the game, I wasn't keen on its brevity versus its price, a repeating issue with Relic Entertainment games (with just 11 missions and one faction playable in campaign mode, though this expands to four in multiplayer), and the slow drip-feed of content over the next four years. I also found the first expansion, Winter Assault, underwhelming enough that I never checked out the later two (Dark Crusade and Soulstorm). It also didn't help that Relic's Company of Heroes took ideas from Dawn of War and made many of them work much better in a World War II context.
Now Relic have taken a leaf out of the Age of Empires book - reasonable given their work on Age of Empires IV - and combined all of the content for the original Dawn of War and released it as a "definitive edition," with all of the game and expansion content and factions rolled into one package, moderately remastered. This isn't a comprehensive remake. The game looks a bit better than in 2004 with higher-resolution textures and a better draw distance, but it's mostly the same game with a slight shine added rather than a massive update. That said, it's a definite improvement and an easy recommendation if you are new to the game. Far more important is removing the original game's memory limitations, allowing it to scale much more nicely and appropriately with modern hardware rather than being limited to just a few gigs of memory. There are also some interesting new options, like being able to keep corpses on the battlefield rather than them disappearing over time, which makes the psychotic kill-count in some battles much clearer. These changes should also allow for more impressive mods to appear.
The Definitive Edition also handily removes a lot of the issues I had with the original game. This is now a big game taking about 50 hours for a full run-through of all four campaigns with a single faction (far more if you try to 100% it with every side), featuring no less than nine factions: the Blood Ravens Chapter of the Space Marines, the Orks, the Chaos Marines, the Eldar, the Imperial Guard, the Tau, the Necrons, the Dark Eldar and the Sisters of Battle, making multiplayer correspondingly more interesting. This is now a pleasingly chunky package as opposed to the anemic original release.
It's also a varied one, with each of the four titles having a different approach. The original Dawn of War is a linear, story-led campaign with you guiding the Blood Ravens under Captain Gabriel Angelos in the defence of Tartarus. At first the battle is a straightforward clash between the Space Marines and their Imperial Guard allies (not a full faction in the first game, but some units are playable in some missions) against the invading forces of the Orks. But soon the Eldar and the Chaos Marines both intervene, with all sides tracking a powerful artifact. There are plot twists and betrayals in the well voice-acted cutscenes, as well as the clash of forces on the battlefield and an a reluctant alliance of convenience between people whom in other circumstances would be mortal enemies. It's all good stuff, just a bit on the easy side even on higher difficulties, and far too short.
Winter Assault switches gears and sees a battle unfold for control of the planet Lorn V, fallen to Chaos, with the Imperial Guard tasked with reclaiming the planet for the Imperium, with some limited support from a small group of Ultramarines. The Eldar provide clandestine support from the shadows, hoping to use the humans to soak up the invading Chaos and Ork forces before revealing themselves. The twist here over the base game is that the story is divided into two distinct campaigns: Order and Disorder. Both campaigns see the factions forced into an uneasy alliance (Elder/Imperial Guard and Chaos/Orks), with the player having the freedom to choose which faction within each alliance will gain the upper hand. This is a clever way of making the most out of limited assets, as there's only a handful of maps. The game's structure allows you to revisit each map with different factions and alliances doing different things. Having said that, it's still a very short game, and the only Dawn of War title not to have any presence from the Blood Ravens, making it feel separate from the rest of the canon.
Dark Crusade throws a huge curveball into the mix. There is no linear, story-led campaign here at all. Instead, there is a strategic map of the planet Kronus, when multiple armies fighting for it. You tell your forces where to attack next, with each province of the planet providing different bonuses and abilities. Seize the planetary starport and you can mount assaults anywhere on the planet rather then the immediately adjacent provinces. Seize an industrial region and you start your battles with more resources. It's not exactly Total War - what to do in each province is pretty limited - but it does offer some interesting choices and some of the most challenging battles of the entire collection. The main problems with it are a lack of exposition on what's going on with the strategic map and how to play optimally, and the baffling absence of any kind of autosave. You have to manually save regularly or lose progress, no matter how many battles you win. It's barmy nonsense. It also doesn't help that the game doesn't explain the "Honour Guard" mechanic, which is the key to winning some of the endgame, ultra-hard battles. The expansion does add the Necrons (always a hard species to balance correctly) and Tau into the mix, and does a good job with them.
Soulstorm is where it feels like the wheels have come off the game a bit. It's basically Dark Crusade II, though for some reason it looks a lot worse (the attractive strategy map of Dark Crusade has been replaced by something much more primitive and ugly here). It looks bigger, as it unfolds over three planets and several moons, but the provinces are just bigger and scattered over the various worlds instead. The game adds the Dark Eldar and the Sisters of Battle to the mix but I'm not sure if they were playtested, as their balance feels a bit off. The game is also odder in that it's generally more straightforward and easier than Dark Crusade, but the last couple of factions you have to eliminate will have built up so much strength that in order to defeat them, it becomes a bit of a joyless slog. Soulstorm also - utterly nonsensically - doesn't keep structures from previous missions in the same province in place (unlike Dark Crusade). I'm assuming this is because in Dark Crusade it was a viable strategy to take every strategic point on every map and hugely fortify it before assaulting the enemy base and ending the mission, making it almost impossible for the enemy to actually win counterattack missions. But it's otherwise illogical why all the infrastructure you spent ages building up in a region are missing just five minutes later. Soulstorm also has very little story (even less than Dark Crusade) and plays even less lip service than Crusade as to why the Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and Imperial Guard are fighting one another. Soulstorm is the weakest link here, even if moving your armies around to conquer territories and paint the map your colour retains some appeal.
The core appeal of the game remains intact. Sending scout forces out early to secure territory to gain enough recruitment points to form a huge army that then assaults the enemy position never gets old, resulting in a constant tension between attacking, defending, capturing and consolidating. Get the timing of your attack wrong and you will pay a heavy price. Animations remain among the best-in-class, and the polish-up from this remaster allows the game to remain visually pleasing whilst also being playable on a potato. The combination of the four titles into one gives it enough heft to be worth the reasonable asking price, without even counting the possibility of mods and multiplayer.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Definitive Edition (****) is, indeed, the definitive edition of the game. There's probably not enough of a change here to justify the purchase for established veterans who already own all the content, but for newcomers or maybe those who got the original game but skipped the expansions, this an enjoyable experience. The game is available now for PC.
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