Dawn of War: Winter Assault

An impressively complete expansion pack

Overall score:

Dawn of War was a fine game. It was fast, fun, very furious and had a lot of explosions (which is always a bonus). But it had some flaws. The single player was weak, and the Skirmish AI not worth much, depending on stupidly quick rushes but falling to bits around the 10 minute mark. Regardless, it sold a metric ton of copies, and sparked much online blood letting.

Relic knew what they were getting into when they started work on Dawn of War (hereafter referred to as ‘DoW’) – they were getting involved with a large, rabid, geeky fanbase who froth at the mouth at the merest mention of their favourite army. To this end, they almost immediately started work on an expansion pack once DoW was shipped. They did a poll on the GW site asking which faction would be favourite. They watched the forums, seeing how the nerds dissected each factions flaws. And they came out with Dawn of War: Winter Assault.

The expansion pack includes a lot of things. A new map set – this is a group of textures and models that are used to make maps. The original game shipped with 2 – ruined urban and jungle. Winter Assault adds, to great surprise and consternation, a snow set. This goes a long way to relieving the tedium of yet another jungle map. The main addition of WA, however, is the new race. The Imperial Guard are one of the oddball races of 40k – not in the sense that they are very alien and weird, but that they are so normal and everyday. To see the Imperial Guard is to see WW2 Russia on the march. The tanks are big, bulky, bombastic and simple. The infantry are numerous and quick to die. The commanders are callous and care not for losses. They even have Commisars, who execute soldiers to make nearby ones fight harder (complete with a catchy soundbite when he fires the shot).

So the Imperial Guard look and sound like Russians. But how do they play? There is a lot of arguments over the defensive or non-defensive nature of the Guard. Their buildings are all bunkers, with connected tunnels, so that they can garrison any of their production buildings (including the HQ and Listening Posts) with infantry units and builders. This is very useful for when your main base is under attack, allowing your infantry to kill the enemy in safety. Many attacks will wilter under the sheer weight of fire. The infantry units can even move around, using the aforementioned tunnels, from one to the other – very useful for moving units to the front line quickly and responding to attacks. However, their building footprints (the space they take up on the map) is considerably larger than that of the other 4 races. This means, crucially, that they can fit fewer turrets into chokepoints, reducing their defensive nature. Personally, I believe that it is a trade off – the Guard can defend their main base amazingly well, but are rather poorer at holding choke points and approach paths to the base.

The guard also aquire population cap increases by building more production buildings – each tank factory will allow you to build between 2 to 3 more vehicles, depending on the tank in question, up to a global maximum. This, combined with the large footprints, means that the Guard need a lot of room to build. You’ll often find yourself building production buildings at the frontline, out of lack of space elsewhere. The Guard techtree is much the same as that of the Space Marines – they get access to level 2 by building an Infantry Command and the armoury equivalent, and level 3 by building the Tank Factory. Bizarrely, however, they much research a tech level 4 to get hold of their best tank, which does not need a relic. Most other races only need the tech level 4 for their relic super units. Given how inspiringly awesome the Leman Russ Battle Tank is, that’s probably a balancing element.

Units wise, the Guard are a mix of tough tanks, with great ranged damage but no melee ability, and swarms of infantry who are deadly shots but cannot take much damage. Their tanks hit all the notes – from nimble walkers with anti-tank guns, flametanks who murder entire squads, long ranged artillery that fire from 2 screens away and T34 style Main Battle Tanks with really big guns. The infantry comes in 3 varieties – normal, super and melee. On their own, the Infantry are effective but fragile, but luckily (for the Guard) they can have Officers added to them. There are 3 officer types. One is the Commisar, with his trusty execute ability, causing all nearby squads to double their firerate. The second is the Priest, who is a melee monster and can cause his squad to do much more damage for a short period of time. And the last is the Sanctioned Psycher, who can wang around bursts of lightning and a minor version of the Farseers Mind War ability. None of their officers even begin to match up to the commander units of the other factions, but when you can get 3 of each, they don’t really have to. The Guard also get a General, who can have 4 buddies (drawn from any of the 3 types). I’ve never found the General to be particularly effective, however.

Relic also took the chance to majorly tinker with all the races. They changed the way they worked, speeding up their technology advancement, added a new unit to each of them and addressed a host of balancing issues. There are too many changes to go into here, but the tech speed-up is the main one. That was done because Relic found that most matches were over at the 10 minute mark. This meant that, in the original DoW, nobody was seeing Tier 3, and many games never saw Tier 2, as people were winning with the basic units. The speed-up doesn’t make the games last longer, but it means people get access to the better units faster, so those games now see Tier 3 sometimes. It’s a funny way to go about dealing with it, but it seems to have worked. The new units are fairly solid and acceptable. The Space Marines get a new commander unit, the Chaplain, who buffs nearby units instead of calling down orbital strikes. The Eldar get an Infantry anti-tank unit, filling one of the most notable holes in their arsenal. The Orks get the Mega Armoured Nobz, an expensive unit that is very tough to kill but not amazingly effective at killing things. And chaos get Khorne Beserkers, which fill the ‘4 minute melee rush unit’ slot vacated by the Possessed.

The expansion pack includes a new campaign. The story is a new one, not connected to that of the original DoW, and revolved around a Titan (a huge, 40 story tall, walker that in the background leads huge assaults) that was left on a world the Imperium lost to chaos. It is a fairly good story, divided into 2 campaigns that lets you use all the races, and includes 12 fun missions. It won’t take you long to complete all of them, perhaps 10 hours, but at least it’s a lot harder than the DoW campaign.

So, Winter Assault adds a new race, new units, a new terrain set, a new campaign, new music, and includes a fairly major change to the way DoW works, making it practically a new game. There isn’t really much to complain about, with all of the new additions being welcome and the changes generally being good. As with all expansion packs, you’ll only buy this if you liked the original game, but if you do like DoW, there is no excuse to not pick up WA as well.

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Written by Charlie82 on February 20th, 2006