Fun, fast, furious. You'll be smashing orks and shooting down Eldar like a pro before you know it
Blood spurts, bodies hang around and tanks explode all very nicely. Watching the guns fire is something a tabletop gamer like myself enjoyed, watching the pale blue lascannon vut through your enemies is something left only to your imagination before but you can now watch it, realistically created in full 3D. The engine for this game is really one of the best for an RTS. This of course excludes the Total war series' battle scenes.
In fact my only problem with the engine is it doesn't have anti-aliasing built in, I have to force that through my drivers.
Nothing beats 90 bolters firing at once when it comes to sound, with explosions blasting out of your subwoofer and waking the neighbours. The sound in this game is very realistic. Although at times it gets a little confused.
The creators of Dawn of War clearly put a lot of effort into making the game easy to control. First off, unlike age of empires, you can select whole units at once, allowing for much more versitile combat and faster movement of trrops. It also mean that if you select a group of Eldar Guardians you wont get any Dark reapers or something in their. Their is a limit on the troops you can have but its still a large army you can amass. Their is a campain mode, and your typical Warhammer style plot to it. Your Space Marine Chapter, the Blood Ravens, has been called to a planet to defend the population from orks. The imperial Guard are over run and the people are dying. As you fight your way through you will discover other factions at work on the planet, the hordes of Chaos, loyal to a false emperor, the Eldar, who have great disdain for humanity and of course the blood thirsty, relentless orks.
The difficulty is well sacled, ranging from Easy to Insane for you veterans out there.
Where this game really shines for me is the multiplayer, I really enjoy it. I've had enough fragging my friends in counter strike, I've played enough racers, and dont get me started on other RTS games. Somehow this game is addictive, I never get tired of waging war against another player, even after almost 30 hours of online play. Its hard to put my finger on why but this games multiplayer keeps me coming back again and again.
This Game is good for both Warhammer fans, Die-hard RTS fans and anyone else vaguely interested in it. At the £10 I've seen it selling for you get loads of hours of enjoyment.