The Lava Lamp

[tim]

Dawn of War

Faced with the difficult task of translating the themes and concepts of the august Warhammer 40,000 (40K) setting to an action RTS, the developers decided not to, and instead make a Warcraft 3 (WC3) mod. Dawn of War (DoW) isn't just a bit cloney in the sense in which it's an RTS of a similar technology level and vaguely similar mechanics - from the player's point of view it's the same game, down to the hotkeys and the shortcuts and the way damage types work against each other in the mechanics.

It has its own engine, of course, so technically it's not a mod, but other than the significant graphical improvements, you really can't tell. In fact, Dawn of War is different to Warcraft 3 in exactly three ways: 40K setting, point capturing and squads. It also has its own single player campaign, of course.

40K Setting

Because they're making a Warcraft 3 mod instead of a game, the developers never really answered the question of how to achieve 40K-like warfare in an RTS. Instead you do it like a Dune 2 does it, you build buildings, and the buildings build troops, and the troops die, and you build more troops. If (God forbid) you take the 40K universe seriously, this is never going to work - if the thought of chain-building Avatars or Dreadnoughts or other ancient, irreplaceable wargear seems bizarre, then it's not going to work out for you.

On top of this, rather than coming up with a way of balancing the unit types against each other in a manner faithful to 40K, they ripped the system of hacking, piercing and siege damage straight out of WC3 and relabelled it for 40K - infantry with poor armour, infantry with Space Marine armour saves, vehicles and buildings. Hilariously, because of the way WC3 mechanics work, weapons are ineffective against the incorrect armour types, so while you can mow down infantry all day long with a heavy bolter, a lascannon will take multiple shots to kill a single Eldar.

So to substitute for any mechanical faithfulness, they decided to go with art resources. Let's be completely fair - the modelling, animation and sound in DoW are *fantastic*. The plastic figures on your desktop come to life, rumble onto the computer screen and start shooting the crap out of each other. Love, skill and talent was poured into every melee combat finishing move, every point capturing acknowledgement, every giant death laser attack. You could throw more into the graphics engine to pretty everything up, but the game is already stunning in its representation and characterisation.

Space Marines sound off like Darth Vader, with the officers quoting Thoughts for the Day. The Orks manage to pull off Orks while being engaging rather than embarrassing. The Chaos voices *are* a little embarrasing, but the Chaos Marines are pleasingly insane. The Eldar are effiminate and arrogant, and convincingly so, rather than just limp-wristed as is often the case with Elves.

Bolters are the only real disappointment here, which is a shame, because bolters are the second pillar of 40K. First, Space Marines, second, bolters. Third is uh, Orks or something, whatever. If you're familiar with DoW and not 40K, it might surprise you to learn that a bolter is not a machine gun, it's a rocket launcher. The otherwise execrable Fire Warrior knows what a bolter is - it's a terrifying semi-automatic rocket launcher that makes people explode. Since the DoW art team clearly know what they're doing, I can only assume this is some weaselly management decision due to wanting the Space Marines to have a more intuitively understandable weapon.

So we have a game that looks EXACTLY like 40K, and sounds like you'd really, really hope 40K would sound. It doesn't play like 40K though, or feel like 40K. It feels like Warcraft 3. Make of that what you will.

Point Capturing

One of the potentially disappointing things about WC3 is the discovery that skirmishes are won not by destroying the enemy base, but by taking and holding gold mines. A strategic point in DoW is just a gold mine that you can build a turret on. That's all. A critical location is a gold mine that you can't build a turret on. While fighting over critical locations is perfectly good fun, it doesn't actually change the fundamental RTS gameplay in any way unless you make a gentleman's agreement not to attack each other's bases. Really all it does is eliminate the trailing endgame of having to actually kill off every last player once you've dominated econonically. So, yay.

Squads

Squads are one of the fundamentals of 40K. In a startling break from the usual copy-it-from-WC3 MO, DoW implements squads rather than having you build invidual units and group them up however you like. Unfortunately, they're rubbish. They're fine when you build one and it stands about in formation, or when you run them up and down your base, or for the first opening volleys when a single enemy squad charges into your single squad. As soon as you get into actual combat, it all goes wrong.

Firstly, you can't have your building churn out actual squads. What you get it a little bit of a squad, which you have to micromanage to add more men and guns and things before they can do what you need. This sucks.

Secondly, adding things to the squad is silly. The base and unit construction, while completely ill-fitting with the 40K universe, at least tries to explain it away with having raw materials brought down from orbit by spaceships. Unit reinforcement, by comparison, simply magics new men into the squad (they literally "pop" into existence) and magics new guns into their hands. This at least means you can build up the squad while they're running to the battlefield...

Thirdly, you can reinforce squads during combat. Silliness aside, this affects the core gameplay. Whereas the core gameplay of a classic RTS is microing your focus fire, pulling units and and flipping back to the base to queue more reinforcements, in DoW you also have to faff about iterating through each of your units clicking "reinforce unit". This is not gameplay in its most wholesome form.

Fourthly, squads just don't work when you group them up. Six squads of Space Marines (that's ~60 guys in total) told to attack a target will alternately spread out all over the place (putting themselves inside the range of enemy turrets, etc) and bunch up (preventing each other from firing). While the squad organisation should make coordinating your groups easier, it in fact makes it harder. Like most RTSs, your guys have solid bounding boxes and can't move through each other. Unlike most RTSs, you can't specifically tell the guys with short ranged weapons to stand near the front so they won't get stuck at the back of narrow gaps, unable to fire.

Fifthly, since focus-firing (as opposed to squads getting into firefights on a one-on-one basis) is still the most effective strategy, the presence of all these squads doesn't really add anything to the gameplay in return for all the fiddliness. You group select a bunch of your guys and tell them all to focus fire against enemy squads, which they dutifully (and comically, especially when you have a hundred imperial guardsmen all focusing their lasguns against a single, tiny, enemy commander) do.

Campaign

DoW's campaign really scrapes the barrel of RTS single player modes. It's got everything - nonsensical plot, awful characterisation, lack of attention to source material, turgid in-engine cutscenes, tedious missions which require endlessly repetitive unit building, and a simplistic difficulty setting which bears no resemblance to the game's multiplayer/skirmish mode. So, WC3 then, but worse.

The plot has its moments (such as the gradually rising infestation of Orks) but in general it's a very thinly veiled series of you-fight-these-guys-for-no-reason missions. The characterisation of the primary protagonists (a Space Marine Commander and Librarian, and an Inquisitor) veers between generically forgettable and totally inappropriate. The Space Marine Commander feels guilty about exterminating his home planet in a recent war - despite being a centuries-old, fanatical, fascistic, veteran warrior-knight superhuman who would kill without a thought. The Librarian wanders around being vague and mystical before inexplicably turning traitor in the face of no temptation whatsoever. The Inquisitor was apparently written by someone who knows nothing whatsoever about what an Inquisitor even is, let along what they might be like.

The cutscenes are the usual poorly directed, slow-paced mixture of swooping camera shots which suck the life out of everything and embarrasingly pointing out all the tiny flaws in the character's animation cycles by pretending they stand up to filling the screen rather than only being a few centimetres tall. Special attention has been paid to making sure that at the end of every mission, just after you destroy everything, they show you a cutscene of your troops swooping in and destroying everything again, only this time it's a different mixture of troops to what you used. Presumably it wasn't exciting enough when you were doing it.

The missions are passable at best. Like all old-fashioned RTS missions they're patterned on early RTS games where the AI was no good at beating you. You gradually build up a defence and claim territory, inevitably pushing the enemy back and building more and more guys while they hurl the same ineffectual attacks against you over and over. Not that there's anything wrong with that every so often - but the drip-feeding of one more unit, one more unit as it repeats this formula over and over was pretty boring ten years ago and it's completely uninteresting now. The game desperately needs to do *something* to break it up - and never does, with one possible Squiggoth exception.

Army Painter

Finally, the army painter. Many players will presumably ignore this, but for anyone who's taking the game on its strengths (the art resources, really) it's a fantastic addition. The models aren't quite as customisable as you might want if you're prone to very unusual schemes, but in general you can come up with a variety of quite differently-characterised colour combinations, or exactingly recreate whatever you had on the tabletop.

Unfortunately, any points the game might have earned with this feature are lost due to the bizarre inability to paint your Space Marines during the single player campaign. The developers' explanation for this is that they wouldn't be able to create rich characterisation in the single player campaign if the player were free to play with a force of their choosing. Since the characterisation in the single player campaign is slim-to-none at best, this is a poor justification.
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