Dawn of War: Soulstorm - real time strategy game

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Soulstorm is the 4th title in the Dawn of War real time strategy game series. The original Dawn of War was a critical success, garnering high scores from many reviewers. Personally, I was impressed by some of its revolutionary game mechanics, such as the squad sergeant reinforcements, which kept the player's hands free from the need to rearrange squads manually. Dawn of War’s success spawned two expansions prior to Soulstorm: Winter Assault and Dark Crusade. These are stand-alone expansions, which is a plus, but unfortunately, you can’t play the factions from the earlier titles in multi-player mode.

Metacritic gives Soulstorm a 72 - a very low mark by their standards - and I tend to agree with their assessment. For one thing, I wasn't much impressed by the new faction, named the Sisters of Battle. The style of play with them felt much like the Space Marines, only weaker, and I often found myself wishing that I was playing the Marines. After losing patience and abandoning that game, I didn't have the heart even to try the other new race, the Dark Eldar, and started over with the Marines.

Another big beef I had with the game was the strategic “Campaign” mode, which never made me feel as if my decisions were particularly important. I certainly didn’t feel like I was given the opportunity to sacrifice one advantage in favor of another. This absence breaks what I think is the most important rule of strategy games, which is that you must have the ability to work towards goals you think will give you the edge in the long run. War isn’t about winning every battle, after all: it is about pushing your advantage wherever you have one, and wearing down the opponent over the long run.

The worst part of the experience, however, was invading other factions' strongholds, which consist of carefully laid-out maps filled with objectives. This sort of over-planning by the game designers breaks the illusion that's so critical to player immersion. Throughout the mission I felt less like a commander in the midst of a chaotic battle, and more like a plastic miniature, reenacting a pre-scripted battle on a meticulously engineered diorama.

The bulletted list on the back of the box proclaims, “Liberate, enslave, or destroy entire worlds as you unleash your army’s fury on an interplanetary scale.” There isn’t even a half-truth in this sentence. During my time playing, I never did any of those things on the scale of “an entire world.” I did destroy a lot of the other factions' soldiers, but that's about the entirety of it. Worse, I never felt like I had much of an army to speak of. I quickly discovered that the cost of the honor guards - the game's most powerful units - is completely out of prop with their size and firepower. This is not to mention extra attention required to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't die wastefully, which is particularly hard in some cases, because several of the honor guard squads consist of a single character, who cannot be reinforced.

In summary, I think this real time strategy game is a complete pass. Assuming you already own one of the previous games in the series, Soulstorm won't seem like anything new or special. Meanwhile, if you've never played a Dawn of War game, you’d be better off finding a used copy of an earlier title, or waiting for all of them to be sold as a bundle. The real disappointment for me is that the first Dawn of War contained a lot of ground breaking ideas, so I had great hopes for the franchise. Sadly, as is too often the case in the industry, Relic seems to be content to coast on the momentum of its real time strategy games earlier successes and continue grinding out bland remakes for as long as people keep buying them.

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