Overview
DoW offers everything your standard RTS should do with a robust and engrossing single player campaign being the main meat of the title. Add to this a skirmish mode and multiplayer and that just about wraps up what’s on offer. Now that doesn’t really sound like a lot, but believe me, that’s more than enough to keep you going for a good while.
Right from the start, DoW comes across as being one of the most polished games I’ve seen. The intro sequence alone deserves a mention and is truly fantastic. If you’ve got a beefy sound system whack the volume up, ignore the neighbours and enjoy. I’m pleased to say that the standards promised by such a good intro are upheld all the way through the game. Its hard to define what makes a game feel as if a lot of effort and work has gone into it, but this one certainly feels like an awful lot of time has been spent on making it as playable and welcoming as possible. The main screen is nicely animated and is where you choose how and what to play and where the single player campaign kicks off from.
The single player mode follows the story of a Space Marine commander on the trail of something fishy during an Ork invasion of the planet. The first few missions are really tutorial mission, which won’t tax a seasoned RTS fan in the slightest. In fact, if you really want a challenge, forget about playing the game on the ‘normal’ difficulty level as it’s a tad too easy. Put it onto ‘hard’ for a proper challenge or ‘insane’ for not having a hope of winning some of the later maps.
To be honest, I’m a little confused as to why the first two missions are actually there at all. The game has a separate and extremely comprehensive tutorial level built in and even advises you to play that before launching a campaign. So why have two ‘trainer’ type missions in there? Sure, lets start things off slowly, but how about making them a bit more challenging?