"While Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III is a vastly more enjoyable RTS game than Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II, the developers' insistence on chasing trends resulted in a title that was somehow worse than many titles released during the RTS Dark Ages (2006-2013)."
In our previous reviews of the Dawn of war franchise, we have Rise, Fall and Revival of the RTS genre, and for those interested in the history of the genre I humbly recommend our coverage of Dawn of War ↪ and Dawn of War II. ↪
Unfortunately for fans of the RTS genre the end of the Dark Ages did not mean the end of developers and publishers not understanding the RTS genre or its fans, and that is exactly what happened with Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III, a traditional RTS game held back by multiplayer-first pacing and time wasting mechanics.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III is absolutely gorgeous, the unit models are superb, the word design is fantastic and even the 2D animated cutscenes look amazing, and feature top notch voice acting, a huge improvement over monotoned concept art slideshows of Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II.
That said, while Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III has the best cutscenes in the history of the franchise, part of me still has a soft spot for Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War’s in-game cinematics, which filled me with all manner of warm fuzzies and nostalgia.
Unlike Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II in which every enemy was a bullet sponge, combat in Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III feels fast paced and impactful, with each faction having distinct strengths and weaknesses, that ensure that each encounter to feel fresh and potentially dangerous.
I was particularly impressed by the inclusion of elite units, which manage to feel both powerful and balanced at the same time, ensuring that while an elite unit can turn the tide of any encounter battle, they cannot most battles single handily.
This balance is very difficult to achieve, and I personally feel the developers did an amazing job of incorporating elite units, into what is otherwise a pretty standard recruitment focused real-time strategy game.
For the most part, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III’s campaigns vastly superior to everything released since the Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War’s Winter Assault campaign,.
While I am not a fan of being forced to swap between factions repeatedly, as I prefer playing as a single faction per playthrough, the factions all play very differently, and the heroes and villains you encounter throughout the campaign’s 17 missions are very authentic to lore, and well written.
My only issue with the campaign is pacing, which clearly was designed with multiplayer sandbox gameplay in mind, and as a result some missions feel excessively slow, due to players only being given access to 1 or 2 resource nodes, which when fully upgraded award less than 50 power per minute.
Such a slow trickle of income results in long waits between encounters as players are forced to at times wait over five minutes to generate enough power to build a single vehicle or research an upgrade.
While these rates and costs work great when there is an entire map full of resource nodes to conquer in multiplayer mode, in some single player missions invisible walls keep players boxed into a small area, which can have as few as one or two nodes accessible, and in one instance they were not even the “good nodes”, and only offered players the ability to extract a single resource.
When playing Dawn of War III for the purposes of this review, I noticed that I would more time waiting for my resource generators to produce enough resources to create units, than actually playing the game.
And while on a few occasions I was able to skirmish to secure more resources, there battles would often result in losses that would often take over 10 minutes to replace, meaning that a single encounter to capture a node that produced 22 power per minute could have cost me north of 200 power and over a thousand units of requestion, not including the cost of the listening post and resource gathering nodes, which in the early stages of each mission can be rather difficult to acquire.
This problem did not exist in Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War or its excellent remaster ↪, in which players were able to build power generators, and resource nodes awarded requestion at a much higher and more sustainable rate, in addition to allowing players to place defensive structure around strategic command points, freeing up units for combat operations.
While some Christians dislike all things Warhammer and lump it in with everything else they do not like as dangerous, evil or demonic, I feel the total reverse is true. You can read more about my views on the Warhammer universe in my blog post titled Deep Dive #7 - The Grimdark and the Light.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III is a 4x strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sega of America, it released on 27 April 2017, and is available exclusively on PC.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III supports the following peripherals:
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III is rated PEGI 18+ and contains:
I really wanted to like Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III, it is in many ways far more authentic to the the original Dawn of War than of its stand alone expansion packs, and yet the developers instance on incorporating mechanics more commonly found in multiplayer games, into the campaign resulted in a campaign that comes very close to the original, only to fall short due to its horrendous pacing, and forced perspective swapping.
While the game pacing works better as a multiplayer title, it was never very popular to begin with due to playing being forced to farm currency (Skulls) to unlock passive abilities and elite units, and while this was eventually removed, the damage was done and the multiplayer community had moved on.
Even the announcement of Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War IV has done little to revitalise Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III, which even after a near 100% increase in player count, still struggles to surpass 200 concurrent players for much of the day.
Ultimately Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War III is not a terrible game, and there is some enjoyment to be found if you are a huge fan of the Warhammer 40K universe or RTs games in general.
For everyone else, I recommend you spend your time and money elsewhere, as there are much better games out there, including the excellent remaster of Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, which I highly recommend ↪.
We found Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
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