Ballistics Report

Pros

Action!
Warhammer is very fast-paced, full of explosions, and easy to get into.

Graphics
While it’s not the most beautiful game in the world and is hampered by an older engine that traces its ancestry to Impossible Creatures, it has faithful, if not inspired, art direction and is as bloody as the Warhammer universe you know and love. How bloody? Dreadnoughts impale their enemies and then spin them around on their mechanical arms, resulting in a bloody shower for all nearby.

Warhammer universe
The most utterly violent setting imaginable. Four different, well-developed factions, each hating the other three. Now this isn’t the most faithful translation of the series, but it’s the only one in real-time.

Sound
The sound effects are spectacular, the music… less so. The voice acting can come off as bad, but in fact it’s mostly repetitive and the dialogue is cheesy. Then again, hearing the Force Commander say “beware the mutant, the alien, the heretic” takes a very long time to get old.

Multiplayer
We doubt that Dawn of War is about to bust into the CPL, but it’s the rare kind of game that can grip total RTS newbies and suck them in. Good for LAN parties.

Cons

Campaign
It’s short, rather uninspired and extremely simple. We’d wish there was more of it, but it seems like Relic had trouble making something even so short as this moderately compelling.

Too simple for some
Dawn of War is a pretty basic RTS, certainly friendly enough to newbies but not likely to keep someone’s attention for a year or draw in the hardcore audience.

Pathfinding
The single most annoying problem with the game is its terrible pathfinding. Units routinely get stuck or take the longest way around.