In this review in progress, I’m covering only Dawn of War 3’s single-player campaign. The final review will include multiplayer and will follow close to launch on April 27.
The single-player campaign of the third Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War RTS is a bloody mess, in both the good and bad senses. The pendulum of the series’ design ideas has swung back from Dawn of War 2’s tactical RPG mechanics toward the larger armies and basic base-building of the first game, which is fine in concept. But the Dawn of War 3 campaign’s scattered pace and complex mechanics, seemingly aimed at high-level competitive players, make it tough to dive into and get the hang of.
With its focus on controlling up to three powerful hero characters next to disposable troops, Dawn of War 3 feels like a spiritual successor to Blizzard’s divisive Warcraft 3, the game from which DotA and the entire MOBA genre was born. Dawn of War 3 is distinctly set apart by major differences like Relic’s signature control point resource generation systems, but its abandonment of Dawn of War 2’s cover, suppression, and weapon facing systems make give it more of that fun and fast old-school pacing. A little sadly, though, it feels less like its own unique thing.
It’s definitely still big on grim Warhammer 40K spectacle.
It’s definitely still big on grim Warhammer 40K spectacle, including battles with absolutely gigantic super mechs that cut swaths through enemy armies, flashy and bloody effects as lasers, bullets, and melee weapons carve soldiers to pieces, and bodies flying everywhere. Watching the Space Marine leader, Gabriel Angelos, stride across the battlefield and smash an Ork with his enormous hammer is always entertaining, especially since he stands easily twice the height of a normal Space Marine and in order to help you pick him out in the fray when dozens of units (each part of a squad) collide. It looks great, and while the animations might not have quite the gory flourish of those in Dawn of War 2 (moves in which a large unit grab a small one and rip it to shreds are notably absent this time), they’re still outstanding considering how much is happening on screen at any given time. The counterpoint is that high settings were too much for even my GTX 1080 when running at 1440p with no antialiasing - it was hovering around 40fps most of the time.
The lengthy 17-mission campaign is driven by a paint-by-numbers Warhammer 40K story full of Wrestlemania-like shouting, much of which Ork leader Goreguts very effectively boils down to “I WANT DAT POINTY STICK!” The voice acting enthusiastically embraces the over-the-top writing, I’ll give it that. Nearly every subsequent mission cycles between the perspective of the Space Marines, Orks, and Eldar factions, and while I like getting to try out those armies in a single-player setting, the pacing is a questionable decision for a couple of reasons. For one, you don’t get the same time to get to know any one group of heroes that we did in Dawn of War 2 and its expansions, so most of them feel flat even after listening to the optional expanded dialogue during mission briefings. The other issue is that because Dawn of War 3 is a complex game, switching between three significantly different factions so frequently meant it was tough to grasp their nuances, and it was close to the end of the campaign before I began to feel comfortable with any of them.
That's not to say the missions are short – each one takes 20 minutes to an hour, so there’s no shortage of content. In my case, it felt even longer because there’s no autosave, so it’s easy to lose close to an hour of progress if you don’t save manually and something goes wrong. A few times I failed at the end of a multi-stage mission and had to repeat the whole thing. It was totally my fault for not saving early and often, but also it felt like a reasonable assumption that Dawn of War 3 should have checkpoints at logical points.
There’s more than enough variety in the three factions’ unit design.
The three factions differ from each other in a few interesting ways. The Orks, for instance, upgrade themselves using scrap piles, a unique resource that’s generated by towers or left behind after vehicles or buildings are destroyed. They can even scavenge those piles to build a new mech in the field, and they can also reinforce squads on the go with certain units, letting them keep up the momentum of an attack. Meanwhile, Eldar units are shielded, and you can teleport their buildings anywhere on the map and then warp their armies between any two. At the same time, they’re much faster and better fighters when within range of a warp gate, so controlling lots of territory is important for them. And Space Marines, while the most straightforward of the bunch, have tons of armored vehicles and tricks like a deployable battle standard that boosts them in combat. There’s more than enough variety in the three factions’ unit design to make them feel distinct – even the similar basic infantry units are set apart by different special abilities.
But it’s surprising that the level design doesn’t take more advantage of each faction’s traits to do something unexpected. There’s a fair variety of fighting from point A to point B to destroy a target, timed holdouts against waves of enemies, and scrounging for resources without a base to fall back on, but that’s about it. Very few of the challenges in any of the missions feel like they’re tailored to any one faction over the other two. Maybe StarCraft 2 has spoiled me for RTS campaign design, but straightforward fights lose their appeal after a while.
On the first playthrough of the campaign, Dawn of War 3’s micromanagement-heavy unit mechanics felt complex for complexity’s sake. Especially within the elite hero units’ abilities, there’s layer upon layer of status effects, damage types, and subtle rules that make it difficult to tell what’s going to happen when you zap someone with it. I’m still not sure how to quickly tell which unit has which armor type, and it doesn’t go out of its way to teach you things like which units counter which. That will all inevitably bear itself out in the multiplayer community, but the campaign is a separate beast.
I’d have liked to have experimented with more army modifiers in the campaign.
Add to that separate progression systems for all three factions that allow you to unlock various optional tweaks to your units’ mechanics, such as allowing Space Marines to reinforce from resource point towers or giving Eldar banshees a temporary shield after they’ve scored six kills. (You won’t come close to unlocking all of these with a campaign playthrough, as you won’t earn nearly enough currency and about a third of them are locked to a far higher level than I reached at completion.) You can equip any three at once, which I’m sure will lead to some interesting combos, but so many of the cooler ones are locked behind multiplayer grinding. That’s a tease because I’d have liked to have experimented with some in the campaign so I could know what to work for later.
Then you have to level your individual elite units in order to unlock all of their abilities, which is another slow process that’s clearly meant more for multiplayer than single-player. (Dawn of War 2’s equipable loot is also absent from this iteration, but you can still customize unit paint jobs.)
It’s a lot to take in, and I’m sure there’s a lot of depth to be mined by high-level players, but a lot of the time I felt like I was guessing at who to throw my units at instead of making informed decisions.
Where the interface does a good job is in organizing your existing forces. It displays every squad on the field or in production as a portrait icon along the bottom of the screen, allowing you to easily see which ones are damaged and need to be withdrawn, and the list helpfully rearranges itself as you assign control groups. I especially like that when playing as Orks I can see which units have been upgraded based on their portraits. The information that’s displayed is displayed well.
I’m annoyed at the lack of a retreat button.
As a Dawn of War and Company of Heroes veteran, though, I’m annoyed at the lack of a retreat button in Dawn of War 3. Since it’s significantly cheaper to bring damaged squads back to your base to reinforce them with fresh troops than it is to build a new squad, it’s maddening to have to go back to doing it myself when I’ve come from a game where they’d make a beeline for home at the push of a button.
Overall, Relic deserves credit for not simply remaking the same game with prettier graphics for the third entry in the series. But from a single-player perspective, this hybrid approach doesn’t feel as strong as Dawn of War 2’s memorable tactical focus. If I had to score it now, based solely on the single-player campaign, I’d give it a 7.2, for good.
Check back next week for the final review, including my thoughts on Dawn of War 3’s multiplayer mode.
Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear gaming rants and lots of random Simpsons references.
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