What Is Real?

Dawn of War

After a long dry spell of playing PC games I finally found new one worthy of my time and my lowered ambitions to do much else. The last great RTS game in my mind was Starcraft. It had near perfect balance of power and a large range of diversity in its races. I waited for years for Blizzard to come out with Starcraft II, and why shouldn’t they- it was one of the bestselling games of all time. After almost giving up hope they announced Warcraft III. Warcraft I and II was the same type of game that Starcraft was and they were good games so I was willing to part with the Sci-fi theme for the Warcraft universe. I finally had something to look forward to.

This excitement was short-lived as soon as Warcraft III was released. This unclean foul mockery of a RTS genre was polluted by introducing new concepts of roll play and the introduction of what Blizzard calls Heroes. They are all powerful creatures that you level up and could almost single handily rip apart an entire enemy base.

After I had already given up hope there would ever be another great RTS game a co-worker told me about a game called Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It is very similar to Starcraft in many ways but adds its own uniqueness to the game such as commanding infantries (squad of units) instead of single units, a complete 3-D world where you can pan around for a 360 view, seamless zoom to watch the battles up close, customization of the army’s look (change the colors of the units and buildings), and more.

If you can overlook the lame story about humans with supernatural powers worshiping a dead Emperor (what year did democracy die exactly?) as a god, the game is pretty fun. I seriously doubt futurologist would agree with there the level of technology in 38,000 years from now. Whatever they say, I seriously doubt we will be driving around in tanks shooting aliens with measly grenade launchers. Warhammer 4,000 would be a more appropriate name. Yes I realize this was originally an old roll play game before it was a computer game, however I am not concerned with whose bad idea it was to begin with.

The different races in Dawn of War are not as diverse or balanced as they are in Starcraft, there are a few units I believe are too powerful, I find the game a little too fast-paced, but in general it is an all around good RTS game. I recommend it to anyone who likes RTS games.