// PC GAMER — GAMING
I've played 2 of Dawn of War 4's campaigns, and they're everything I hoped they'd be
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An RTS is only as good as its campaign. Sure, it's the competitive multiplayer side of things that gives these games their long tail—StarCraft 2 has been the dominant RTS for 16 years for this very reason—but the bulk of initial players will first be seduced by the promise of a killer singleplayer romp. In this regard, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 has the juice.
I've had a couple of weeks to play around with two of the four campaigns—orks and Adeptus Mechanicus—along with the shorter, two-mission prologue featuring the Astra Militarum, and I've been able to set aside my fear that we'd be getting a repeat of Dawn of War 3's issues. Folks, I am loving these campaigns.
Out of the prologue, I signed up with the orks. The greenskins are a good first pick, not just because this campaign comes first in the chronology, but because it's the most straightforward faction. Their units and buildings are the cheapest in the game, and it only takes a few minutes to recruit a basic army right out of the gate. If you just want to smash shit up, the orks are your guys.
This is not to say that you'll be steamrolling everything. You can lose that army even quicker than you recruited it if you just charge in blind. Orks might not be the brightest xenos in the universe, but their ruthlessness and rage is tempered by low cunning—something the campaign narrative leans into.
If you want to make the most out of your green tide of devastation, you'll want to do a bit of recon, figuring out what toys your opponents are playing with. This won't just determine the units you should recruit, but the wargear upgrades you give them as well. Like the tabletop game, you're given a lot of versatility, which includes being able to switch up the weapons on individual units, which in turn lets you handle specific threats more effectively.
The ork campaign is a fun one, full of large green idiots posturing, backstabbing and getting all charged up about the prospect of squashing humies. You'll start as the boss of a local band of angry lads, but then spacefaring orks fall from the sky, and their boss (a familiar face for Dawn of War vets) quickly decides the world of Kronos is his—the native orks aren't really OK with that.
So a lot of this campaign is focused on this competition between the two groups. A particularly great mission sees you competing in a race with this ork interloper. The first side to destroy the Adeptus Mechanicus base wins the race and gets to be the big boss (not that orks are sportsmanlike or tend to honour deals).
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The armies are separated and must push up their respective paths, with the UI showing who's winning. It's a brilliantly designed map, with a slight MOBA vibe because of its lane setup, but also featuring some spacious areas for big fights and base building, lots of chokepoints, and some elevated positions that you'll need your Stormboyz to overcome. Across most of it, you're separated from the other orks, but you can still see them pushing their way up the map, which I found even more effective than the UI when it came to lighting a fire under my arse. At the top and bottom of the map, however, the two sides are linked, which inspires a bunch of sneaky backstabbing.