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Excellent PC adaptation of the tabletop classic, Warhammer 40K!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 36 / 37
Date: March 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This package contains both the "Game of the Year" edition of Dawn of War plus the Winter Assault expansion pack.

This "Game of the Year" edition of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (DoW) contains new battle maps, online features and an observer mode to enhance what was already a terrific RTS computer game. Each of the four races in the game look and behave as one would expect from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 (aka 40K) universe. The Eldar are graceful and cultured in their speech and appearance (think High Elves in space), performing marvelous acrobatic moves in combat. Orks are brutal, awkward and ramshackle in their appearance and gait, Chaos Marines and their demonic minions are dark, cruel and monstrous while regular Space Marines (enhanced humans) are very industrial and all business. The animations in combat are so good you'll want to play some skirmishes on easy difficulty so that you can take your time looking close up at the individual fighting using the fully moveable 3D camera. There are even special "sync-kill" animations when certain creatures destroy each other. For example, when the Space Marine Commander kills a gigantic Bloodthirster (huge winged demon), the animation sequence is one of the most spectacular in the game!

The skirmish option offers both single and multiplayer modes with many different battle maps from which to choose. This offers near limitless permutations, providing tons of replayability. The campaign is a wee bit linear and not overly challenging, but is loads of fun, has an entertaining story and can be completed by all players regardless of skill level. Difficulty level settings can be used in both campaign and skirmish play to make the game more or less challenging as desired.

The voice acting and music are quite good in DoW and enhance play enormously. The game is highly evocative of the dark, gothic feel of the 40K miniatures game produced by Games Workshop (GW).

Resource gathering is used as is expected in an RTS game, but it is very simple and does not occupy an enormous amount of game time. The emphasis of DoW is all on the action and combat! Resources are gathered by capturing strategic points and critical locations on the battle map. Capture more territory and more resources will be available to you to complete your research and build your army.

Note that the expansion pack for this game, Winter Assault, provides players with even more maps and options, as well as a new fully playable army, The Imperial Guard. The Winter Assault campaign can be played from either of two points of view, "order" or "chaos," and involves a war against CPU controlled Necrons! Skirmish mode, as in the original Dawn of War, adds a lot of replayability value to the game, with many different battle maps and play combinations. Play any of five armies, play with allies or play free-for-all, and that's not counting multiplayer mode!

Between trying to hear all the fun voice acting, see all the great animations, and actually playing the game, Dawn of War Gold Edition will keep you busy and enthralled for many hours. "Let the galaxy burn!"

Must Have RTS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 28 / 28
Date: April 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Dawn of War is, in my opinion, one of the best Real Time Strategy games ever.
For those who dont know what a real time strategy is;
It's a strategy game, (think chess or stratego)where players dont take turns but rather move their pieces simultaneously across the board or battle field. This results in the necessity to think very quickly and excersise strategies on the fly.

While a lot of Real Time Strategy or RTS games force the players to micro-manage resources in order to maintain/strengthen and increase their army, Dawn of War allots resources based on the capture and control of key points located on the field of battle.
This is what really sets the game apart from others of it's kind.
Rather than spend time making sure your pawns are gathering wood or gold, time can be devoted to focusing on the battle at hand and reassessing strategies as well as managing attacks and tactical retreats.

I would strongly recommend that a parent play the game before allowing younger children to play, while it is an excellent mental excersize, the game is set in a futuristic war and can be pretty grisly, blood can be turned off however and bodies can be set to dissapear as soon as they're defeated rather than lay strewn across the landscape.

The expansion pack included with the Gold Version includes and all new single player campaign as well as a whole new playable team or "race". Each Race has it's own individual strengths and weakness so learning these and exploiting them as a commander can be key in beating the game or winning against friends.
The game is also set to have another expansion in the near future that will add 2 more races to the roster for a total of 7 different armies to choose from.

The fighting is excellent and features some of the most intricate animations you'll see in any RTS, special attacks and deaths will happen at random giving the battles a sense of realism and really showcase the loving attention that went into the game.

The graphics are great and while they wont stack up to some of the newer titles being released they still give the game a great sense of atmosphere and individuality.

The online community is not as large as a few others but I'm the kind of player who prefers to play with close friends or against the computer anyway, since online communities can tend to get pretty immature and aggravating.

Again if you like strategy games or Real Time Strategy game this one is worth your time and money. I've been playing the game for about a year and a half now and have yet to get tired of it.

Very fun, enjoyable, and excellent value

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: August 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The gold edition is a highly recommended for RTS fans. The game graphics and animation is stunning, being able to zoom in full detail (with a computer with enough 3D graphics power) makes viewing the replay very entertaining.

The Winter War expansion includes the Imperial Guard, who are weak in ground troops (max squad size reduced from 15 in the original game down to 10. Their strength is in vehicles, more notably the artillery Ballisk and Russ tanks. Heavy infantry Ogryns gives them staying power, but are only available as their "tech" level develops.

Another downside is that the new programming reduces the strength and staying power of the Space Marines too. Their health upgrades only occur once they advance get to Level 1, no longer do they have the health upgrades at Level 0 and 1. This makes a big difference in multiplayer mode where Orks can simply rush and hack their way to victory, it is very hard to kill Orks in close combat with basic level units. It becomes very difficult to defeat the computer in Hard mode as they get their leader unit at the start. Trying to kill a leader unit with basic infantry units for any race is impossible. The only way to counter a quick rush is to quickly build listening posts and weapons platforms for defense against their avenue of attack.

The Winter War expansion campaign consists of 5 Order and 5 Disorder missions. The last two missions for each side can be played as one of four races, Human or Eldar for the Order, Chaos or Ork for the Disorder. Each mission for each race occurs on the same battlefield map, but each has separate mission objectives. Basically the player gets to fight each battle from each different side, pretty neat playability concept.

The fourth mission is perhaps the toughest one to complete as the player is not only competing against the other side, but also the other "ally". They key to finishing the 4th scenario is to pick one side to play and stick with it. It is not designed to have the player play both "allies" and win, only on side can win the mission.

The fifth and final mission pits the victor fighting one final battle against not only their arch enemy, but also the Necrons. Each race has to perform special tasks to win and defeat the Necrons. For the Imperial Guard, the key is to fortify and develop defense in depth before attempting to rebuild the Titan, landmines really slow down the Necrons. The player will also need a couple of Russ tanks and four artillery Ballisks to defeat the Necrons. The other races don't have the luxury of time and will have to balance developing their defenses and accomplishing the special tasks.

This game is very enjoyable if one want to simply play by building units and fighting battles. This is not a resource gathering game like Rise of Nations or Empire Earth. The player is often capped at three "builder" units, which fits the game really well, there are only two resources to collect (requisition points by capturing strategic locations and energy by building generators). Once a resource collection structure is built, it automatically generates so the player isn't distracted in having to assign more "workers" to harvest resources like in other real time strategy games.

Each race also gets a "super unit" if they are able to capture an artifact location. For the Orks (who are really fun to play) it is the Squiggoth, for the Imperials it is the Baneblade super tank, the Eldar and Chaos get their super warrior / demon while the Space Marines get the Rhino tank/ transported (personally prefer the Predator tank myself).

The game has relatively small armies and limited battlefields. The game is typically capped out to approximately 6-10 squads and 5-8 vehicles per race. The battlefields are well balanced, each starting area is given the exact same strategic locations and are a mirror image of each other. However, there are only a few main attack avenues and with the small number of units, it makes developing two attack groups and one defense group hard to perform. Once a player is able to advance and secure an opponent's strategic location, their forces are reduced and will need time to reinforce before continuing to advance, by then the opponent may have already recovered and will be ready to slug it out again. Had there been bigger battlefields and larger armies available, a player could continue to attack and exploit success with a follow-on attack, like in Starcraft of Age of Empires 2 (both can have max population of 200 with very large playing areas).

Bottom line, one of my friends described it the best, W40K Dawn of War is like playing paintball-speedball/ laser tag, quick and balanced playing fields. Age of Empires 2 is like playing a paintball game in a field, larger area to cover, more players, not always balanced terrain, and takes more time to finish. All are fun to play.

A revolutionary RTS.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: November 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Me and my friends simply love this game. Even the ones who've never actually liked RTS games enjoyed it. Well instead of making long paragraphs overviewing the game i'm just going to give you a list of the pros and cons of the game :)

Pros:
- Amazing graphics!
- Runs very smoothly in any multiplayer game as long as you have minimum requirements to play.
- If the host dies or leaves the game the game doesnt end :)
- A team for every player. Some may like customization of their team, others like strategy, and some just want to blow things up with brute force :D.
- Interesting campaign for each team.
- Plenty of maps to play on and if you dont have anyone to play with theres always a challenging skirmish mode with AI.
- Game relies on capture points and power instead of gathering resources.
- Ingame mod manager so you can have multiple mods that you choose to activate.
- Little or no glitches in the game.

Cons:
- Inablity to increase the unit cap limit without downloading a mod.
- Installation is long with several disks
- Some of the ingame characters can be annoying when they talk.
- Game can become somewhat repititive over time.

Verdict:
This game delivers some great singleplayer and multiplayer action. You'll find that even those who wouldnt normally play RTSs' will find this game fun, addicting, and easy to get used to. The game simply takes everything great from the other RTSs' like Red Alert and Ground Control and leaves out the bad parts such as slow tedious resource gathering. The thing that makes this game different from any other game is the variety of teams, you wont have 1 or 2 but 5 teams to choose from (7 if you get Dark Crusade). Ill give this game 5 stars but 4 stars for fun because I'd like to see more multiplayer options such a better spawnpoint selector and a changeable unit cap limit.

I love this game and my friends agree as I quote "If you can get a bunch of people who hate RTSs' to like one, then you've got a pretty good game"

Great game, but 5 CD's not a single DVD :(

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Quite simply, this game is one of the best RTS games ever made. It's complex though---learning a race will take you quite a lot of practice. But you can get good replays from sites such as Dawn of War Sanctuary. Anyway, I'm a huge Warcraft III fan and feel that Dawn of War is competitive in quality.

The first good Warhammer 40K computer game EVER

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I love this game.

Do any of you out there remember the terrible and utter failures that Games Workshop computer games used to be? Remember Space hulk for playstation? Remember Epic 40k for Windows 95? Remember Fire Warrior for PS2? Remember Rise of the Horned Rat for Playstation?

If you do, you have my condolences.

This game, however, is not only a good Warhammer 40K game. Its a good game PERIOD. Loads of fun, and if you're a Warhammer 40K nut like myself, utterly faithful to the source material.

Its an old school RTS down to the roots; this hearkens back to Starcraft and the original Command and Conquer (and since Starcraft was a brutal ripoff of Warhammer 40K to begin with, its nice to see Games Workshop step back in the arena, if only to see what a REAL GW game should be like).

A few areas of game play could be better rounded; the learning curve is pretty steep for new players I've found, since instead of mining resources, you get 'requisition points' for holding and defending strategic nodes on the map. Players who like playing defensively will have a definite advantage while an aggressive player of Starcraft is gonna get pummelled before they learn thes ropes. There are also some serious balancing issues; the Imperial Guard are WAY too powerful and the eldar still dont stand a chance in the hot place where the guy with the pitchfork hangs out against certain other armies... But the intuitive control and insanely cool fighting animations(which are actually more than a silly chopping motions! The battles play out as actual BATTLES; there are times where the enemy will nab a strategic point from you because you're too engrossed in watching your tiny digital army duking it out with the bad guys)help round out the game to a nice, healthy digital shine of quality. And listening to a chaos marine squad scream "Do YOU hear the voices TOO!?" never gets old.

If you enjoy an old school RTS, they dont get much better than this... Subtly challenging gameplay and fantastic environment. Highly recommended.

The Best RTS Ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is amazing. The races (Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, and if your playing Winter Assualt, Imperial Guard) are awesome and have a great backstory. The graphics well umm, I tried the game on my labtop and OMG the graphics were amazing, every particle and detail was seen! The campaign is great, considering the many RTS games that don't. It kind of plays like Warcraft 3, in a way. There is one simple rule BAK (Build And Kill) as I like to say, because that's what you really actually do. You start off on each mission with a stronghold or something else (depending on the race, but they work the same) and you build your worker, he builds stuff. You then send him to build a few buildings, and you can them make troops, this is how the game functions in a way. That's definetly not how you are going to win. There are Critical Points (Which depending on your objective can win you that mission,) Strategic Points (Which give you more requistion to spend,) and the Relics (which are things that are suppose to let you build more troops. You capture these before the opposing force does so he won't have much of a chance of winning.
This makes the game even more strategic and unique. One thing small that kind of sets this game apart from other RTS games is this game has gore! lots and lots gore, but it isn't to bad for a kid to get, thinking about other games like God Of War. Oh and another thing that's sets this game apart is the army painter. This as the name implies, paints your army and vehicles. The vehicles are awesome, ranging from tanks to a massive creature. This game has many cool weapons, like the flamethrower (which is one of my favorites.) Multiplayer is awesome and fun. This game is truly amazing and the best RTS ever.

Dawn of War > Command and Conquer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series is quite possibly the best RTS available at the moment. I've played every Command and Conquer title, Star Wars: Empire at war, Civilization and Age of Empires. Each of those games have their own merits, but Dawn of War comes out on top of the pile in my opinion.

It has an outstanding visual presentation as well as a novel resource system. Tired of your ore harvesters driving through an enemy base or refusing to automatically return with their full load? Not an issue here. The strategic point system allows for a one-time capture, assuming you can hold off your opponent, and provides a steady source of income similar to Age of Empires III villagers.

The tech tree follows the usual pattern, so fans of other RTSs like C&C won't get smashed by the learning curve. Dawn of War incorporates a unit cap similar to Blizzard's Warcraft and Starcraft titles, so you don't get buried under an endless wave of level one infantry. The AI is brilliant, however, so if you aren't careful they will still bury you with a finite wave of infantry. Multiplayer skirmishes against the AI can be brutal; the intelligence level at Hard and beyond is easily a match for most experienced gamers, while Easy is just too easy and Normal works just about right for a novice or casual player.

The game runs well enough on lesser systems, so long as the user isn't foolish enough to try and max out the video settings; the onscreen action gets rather involved during longer or larger matches. On higher end systems, Dawn of War absolutely flies. I'm running on an Nvidia Geforce 7900GT, Athlon 64 x2 3800+ processor, 2gb of Corsair RAM with an ASUS motherboard. With the visual settings maxed out, I've never experienced any technical issues with Dawn of War and it looks amazing.

Basically Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, if not the best, RTS games on the market today.

A game with tremendous potential and graphics, but gameplay was lacking and repetitive.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: January 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am a big fan of RTS games, and have played the Starcraft series and Warcraft series all my life. I also enjoyed the LOTR Battle for Middle Earth series, which I finally got tired of. I was very enthusiastic about the Dawn of War series because it had gotten such great reviews. After playing this game for a couple of weeks, here is my personal review of the Gold Edition, including Winter Assault.

My first impression is that the opening movie sequence, as well as the graphics and details of the game is fantastic! I don't have a supercomputer by any means, but my modest Dell with stock graphic card and half a gig of RAM was able to run the game beautifully. The movement of the characters was flawless, the 3D rotation of the terrain was impeccable, and the way the battle sequences took place was awesome. Characters don't just hit each other until one of them explode in blood, but they shoot, slash, stun, throw, stomp each other like no other game I've ever played. Each unit can also be customized with different weapons and strategies, which I think is a great idea.

Now after playing the campaign for a while (the Space Marines, which was the only campaign in the original), I realized that each mission got repetitive and boring quite quickly, despite the graphics. You build up, you attack, and then you recover, and repeat. Now no one ever praised Starcraft (at least not me) for its superior 3D graphic manipulations, but each mission was different and unique. Upon playing the Winter Assault expansion (2 campaigns), I realized another issue, which is that each of the races, despite having different units, heroes, and buildings, played annoyingly similar to each other, with superficial differences, but not like the differences between the Zerg and the Protoss, or the Night Elves and the Undead (Warcraft ROC). Maybe I'm not appreciating those details that I think are superficial.

Resource gathering is similar to LOTR where you occupy strategic points and then the resource gathers for itself. For me, I think the whole building up of peons to go gather wood or gold or minerals or gas is kind of cool. You also command squads of units instead of individual units, which I kind of liked from LOTR. Having hero units on the field also was something that Dawn focused on, but they never really stand out on their own, or made a difference the way that it did in ROC. Also, despite being in the future and obvious references to planetary travel, there is lacking an aerial portion of this game, which would have made things really interesting. It would have been nice to seem some epic space battles with space battleships and cruisers.

Don't get me wrong, the game has a lot of nice touches, such as having cover in certain terrain (like craters) and negative terrain affecting troops (such as rivers). The problem I think is that it tries to be like LOTR, but doesn't have the fun of building, defending, and storming castles. It tries to be like Starcraft without the diversity in race tech-trees and involving storylines. It tries to be like ROC without the attention to Heroes and the powers they can use to change the tides of battle. I almost feel that if the other games paid attention to the details that Dawn of War has, they would be better games themselves.

4 stars for quality, but only 3 for fun.

Not a DVD

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: April 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is great fun, but FYI this is not a DVD-ROM (despite item description) but 5 CD's. Again, great game, just not nicely compacted onto a single DVD as I assumed it would be from the listing.

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