Warhammer® 40,000: Dawn of War® - Dark Crusade

"Identify our targets, and we will destroy them."

wa wa wee wa is a very nice! i have a chair i have a chair

This game rules.

An oldie but a goodie. In terms of classic base building RTS games this is one of the best, clearly taking inspiration from the like of Warcraft and Age of Empires, but adding new mechanics and maintaining the Warhammer 40,000 aesthetic. Ignore realism and forget about advanced squad controls as seen in later DoW games, this is an army control game.

For all that though this game isn't perfect. Its showing its age in many ways, with somewhat clunky UI controls and missing quality of life elements. The enemy AI can be quickly overcome and starts unraveling if a game lasts too long, and the unit pathing and structure placement rules are a little janky in places. My biggest gripe is that units move to the minimum required range to target an enemy with the longest range weapon in the squad; if the unit has some weapons with longer ranges that means the shorter ranged squad members will just stand about doing nothing while the long range weapons blast away.

Aside from a lot of small scale issues though Dawn of War Dark Crusade holds up in most regards. The graphics are remarkably detailed for the time, and especially given that they were designed for an RTS game. The gameplay is satisfying and rewarding. On singleplayer it remains fun despite the flaws in the AI.

It's been great for a long time, and still is.

Love the lore but unit path-finding is borderline unplayable which makes game-play just frustrating.
I would recommend playing on easy just for the story-line.

Campaign is still fun, but playing through it multiple times for the ending can be a bit of a drag. This is because skirmishes for provinces usually involve just bum rushing the enemy base as soon as you can. Strongholds are where you can play a real DoW game. However, planning out which parts of the map to take and how to spend planetary requisition is an aspect of the game that elevates the overall campaign experience. Getting wargear for the commander is also a nice reward system.

8/10

For the Emperor!

Old but gold

Good game

I have been playing this game for nearly 20 years now. It provides something I cannot find elsewhere. fOr thE DarK GOds

it gud

Great classic game

very game

Best DLC for this game, fun

Still one of the Emperor'd finest games.

Alwayse loved the DOW series dark crusade was the best so far.

Good old warhammer game.

I have forced unwilling men and women to fight a shard of a god. I will do it again~

I hope they will make something like this again

i played a few games with my friend to learn to play and now i cant play online at all

Runs great on Linux! One of my favorite RTS games of all time.

I'm on a mission to play and review everything in my Steam Library, which has grown out of control. 40k Dawn of War is one of the best RTS games of it's time and one of the best 40k games period! I had hours of fun with this back in the day. Glory to the Necrons!

Good

With some cheesing, good to immerse

Simply an Iconic Game

Fighting Necrons is torture. They come inside your base, die there, and from then on it's a cycle of constant respawning inside your base, and worst of it all their leader can turn into an ultimate unit and wreck your base on his own.

Top 5 best warhammer game

Good rts

show fatal scar error and cant finish the mission.

human wave tacticsa re the only thing i know

This has been a staple in my childhood and I have loved replaying it as an adult 10/10

If you're a fan of 40k, this game will be amazing. Tons of replay value with 7 factions.

choose between different races and battle for world domination. build your base quickly and take out the enemy before they overwhelm you in this strategy based game. fun game with all kinds of different cool features and effects varying with each race.

The Necron lord is fucking broken. I love ancient egyptian space terminators <3

it was ok
I played each game completely vanilla on windows 10 and all 4 games (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Anniversary Edition, Winter Assault, Dark Crusade, Soulstorm) booted up just fine they all had the same bug where every 20 - 40 minutes the screen would freeze up and the way to unstick it was to Ctrl+Esc then click back into the game so that was a little tedious however Dark crusade was extra bad where it was more like every 1 - 10 minutes the screen would freeze

other issues are that moving your squads feels extremely similar to the old starcraft broodwar days of trying to make a mass of dragoons/goliaths to walk down a ramp (for those of you who don't know its pretty miserable)

and other problems is sometimes your units just don't attack when they are right next to the enemy for some reason or a few times things would be invisible (I'm not talking about the intentional type of invisable such as cloaked units, Im talking about dropping a command center and after completing you are able to select a "barron" patch of ground to make units and whatnot with

another issue is the super close camera view where you almost can't even see the entire range of some units because it is so close. the anniversary edition and winter assault also don't have widescreen support but supposedly mods have fixes for these video issues however I didn't use any of those

last major problem I encountered on the soulstorm game is that after completing a level the game crashed and I lost about 2 hours of gameplay so I am not willing to replay that and it will get a negative recommendation

other than those issues I actually liked the game enough to beat 3 of the 4 games

This is like the best Warhammer 40K RTS you can play right now. There seven races with their own unique playstyles to choose from. a fun campaign where your free to choose who to attack and conquer alongisde unique missions (like getting a certain number of kills or destroying a enemy base with a tank squadron) spread across the map alongside the strongholds. it very polished unlike soulstorm. there also commander banter and lore to read on the map which help immerse you. the only bad thing i can think of is that some of the maps are big and can be very hard and annoying to conquer, especially if their two enemy bases. but overall this a good 40k game and a RTS in general and absolutely worth buying and playing

Ai is fucking retarded and can only crowd around resources or just bum rush

This game is great. I remember a night when I was a kid, and my buddy and I played it for 14 hours straight switching back and forth during the campaign. As it stands now, I don't play the game because I'm an adult and have obligations in my life. I have a job, an apartment, a woman who loves me, and if I want to keep these things, I have to stay away from this game like a junkie and his fix. I only have 78 minutes in this game because of this.

Good game with good replay value!!!

Brilliant game, whilst yes 20 years old now, still amazingly fun and easy to grasp. Harder to master FOR THE EMPEROR/ DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR (whatever your aligance is.)

One of the best DoW story line IMHO.

By far the best DOW DLC in the 1st installment, allows you to use the Necrons in multiplayer and has the IG as a faction. (You need winter assault to use the IG in multiplayer)

very good game! old graphics but well worth dealing with for its play style and unit choices

For the Greater Good

Kinda boils down to learning build orders, but i like it.

Crashes with no recovery of game being played. Unless you manually save during/after every battle it is stupid to play this game. I don't feel like doing what I JUST PLAYED THROUGH to start over again.

This game is very fun and I still enjoy playing from time to time. Good replay-ability. My only complaint is that the game discourages turtling and base building. The winning strategy is to rush. I like to base build, not frantically upgrade/rush.
I want the ability to make heroes unstoppable through more upgrades/grinding.

The expansion felt a lot smoother, especially with the units' pathfinding AI. The style of its campaign was also quite interesting.

If RTS like starcraft and warcraft and command and conquer are up your alley , this game fits in quite well.

Love the Warhammer 40k franchise in this setting for a RTS setting.

Love the Necrons, Orcs, Tau and Dark Eldar.