Rather than simply fighting a big old scuffle and only moving on to the next level when you eventually win it, you need to make decisions about whether to spend your resources on defensive contingents, in case the enemy makes a play for one of your territories, or on building up a hefty invasion force to make 'liberation' of other zones that much quicker. It's a battle for territory, each conquered zone granting resources and buffs to your forces, and thus being heavily contested. It's no longer the standard cut-scene/battle/cut-scene/battle with some new units formula, but rather hung around a strategy map similar to that of the Total War games. The two new races add an awful lot - more on those later - but it's the complete overhaul of the single-player game that has the greatest effect. Sadly for them, Necron are good at seeing through stealth.įortunately, Dark Crusade is quite the meal. Trouble is, Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 tabletop gaming universe is so rich with frenzied sci-fi invention and homage that every bite upon its delicious flesh only fills you with craving for another. First expansion Winter Assault included a much-improved solo campaign (with a tantalising glimpse of the wonderfully menacing Necron in its closing battle) and introduced the aforementioned Imperial Guard as an interestingly defensive (if largely robotless) race. While the original game looked amazing and offered the best multiplayer RTS kicks of the last couple of years, it wasn't quite as comfortable when wearing single-player trousers.
Robot warsĮven without such spectacular scratching of robot fetishists' itch, first impressions of near-finished Dark Crusade code suggest it's much more complete a prospect than Dawn of War has ever previously been. Do robot suits count as being real robots? The question has yet to be resolved to my satisfaction, but hey, the Tau's mechs stomp, rend and deathray with the best of 'em. The not-necessarily-good-but-morally-ambiguous-at-the-very-least Tau, meanwhile, take more of a Japanese mecha approach. In fact, the new evil faction, the Necron, present a sort of beautiful wish-dream for the discerning science-fiction enthusiast: robots with zombies inside that look like the Terminator and live in a giant floating pyramid. So, this time around, the two new playable races include an awful lot of robots. Men and tanks may well be a staple part of a decent war, but honestly, they're just not as much fun as robots. What didn't - well, not a whole lot actually, but the Imperial Guard, the new race in Dawn of War's last expansion, were a little vanilla. Big robots, small robots, fat robots, skinny robots, flying robots, robots with spinning drillbits for hands, robots with giant laser guns, steam-powered robots with teeth. There's been some canny identification of what did and what didn't work in previous instalments of this sci-fi RTS.