Warhammer® 40,000: Dawn of War® - Soulstorm

I would reccomend dawn of war 2 but this is realy good you can play eldar space marine imperial guard dark eldar necrons sisters of battle tau there might be more

one of Relic's legendary legacy. Relic died after COH opposing front, and dawn of war soul storm.

Still one of the best strategy games available or not available anymore? Well I see, this game is now only avalible with the Dawn of War Anniversary Edition. There are many factions, for me personally, Chaos is the best choice. The campaign (without a real story) with the "World map" is really good. Round for round you are increasing your area. Like a good old Total War. Battles are RTS like and you can also pimp you're commander. Mods can also increase the factions. Mods can increase everything. Wish there would be a remastered version of this game. This game was Relic's masterpiece, after that it went slightly downhill with Dawn of War 2 and with Dawn of War 3 the lowest point was reached (unfortunately).

Its a classic. I mean the original is better but this one supports widescreen.

For how old this game is, it's actually pretty good! Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Soulstorm is a RTS Base building and army commanding game. As far as I know, this game still has a community 15+ years after release, so that really says something about this game. The graphics are decent, and the gameplay is still fun even in today's standards.

Upon loading up the game, you start on the title screen. There are 2 game-modes, those being Skirmish and Campaign. Skirmish is the most replayable of the two in my opinion. In Skirmish mode you build bases, produce troops and fight an enemy team. Your goal is to kill your enemy's troops and destroy your enemy's base. Skirmish sounds simple, but with all of the different types of buildings to build and different troops to produce, the game is very in-depth and is a lot of fun finding what race/troops work best for you. Campaign is basically a series of Skirmish like games, but connected. I haven't really played Campaign much, but basically you go from planet to planet defending or taking over territories on those planets. I believe you can level up you weaponry for your heroes and carry over troops from your last battles.

The list of different races go on and on. The list of races includes:
Imperial Gaurd
Orks
Space Marines
Chaos Space Marines
Eldar
Dark Eldar
Sisters of Battle
Necrons
Tau

This isn't even the best part. There is still a decently large community that has teams of people making mods for this game 15+ years after release. The base game is pretty good, but modding this game is basically a necessity. Mods for this game add TONS of races to play as with TONS of new building and troops which creates entirely new game-play loops. My favorite mods I've played are Unification and Ultimate Apocalypse. Mods for this game are relatively easy, you just go to a website called Mod DB and install them from there.

Another feature that I love is the Army Painter. Army Painter allows you to create a color scheme for any race of your choice and play with in game. Not only does this customization look awesome, but believe it or not this isn't the only use for the Army Painter. I've used the Army Painter to create a custom color scheme for models I've painted in real life. I tested out different color schemes on the Army Painter to see what I liked and then painted the model based off what I created in game. Now I have a custom color scheme I made in game as an army of real models of Imperial Guardsmen for Kill Team.

Unfortunately there are a few issues I've had that come with the age of this game. Every time I load the game the window of the game is super small and I need to change my resolution every single time I load the game. Another Issue I had was crashes. Maybe it was some of the mods I was using causing the crashes, but I've had a few games where I play for an hour and then crash, losing all progress I had. I've learned my lesson and save the game every 20 minutes or so now, but that is just a few minor inconveniences I have experienced.

Overall, for how old this game is it is still a pretty decent game. I recommend this game, but I HIGHLY recommend downloading mods as it makes the game so, so much better!

Probably the best 40k gaming experience as a whole out there. The RTS controls are somewhat outdated, given that it came out in 2008, but the core of the game is pure 40k in all the best ways.

Be sure to download the Unification Mod to greatly expand the amount of Factions you can play with/against. It also enhances all the models and adds new units with their own sounds. My fav new faction is the Inquisition. You can change how the campaign works by using the campaign editor. I highly recommend turning on Persistent Bases, and not using Advanced AI Tactic unless you're a masochist.

Get for the unification mod. This game is a worse version of dark crusade otherwise, still, the factions can be quite fun, especially with the mod for more campaign so you can play as the tyranids.

A classic at this point.

Dawn of War never lacked the atmosphere and 44K lore fidelity.

This is the one real time strategy that not only covers W40k's theme - but also has NINE factions. NINE.
That alone recommends it as unique and outstanding. It's only missing Tyranids. I think everybody else but the fringe and on-and-off factions like the Squatts are there.

To me - it is better than DoW2 because it allows you to field armies that feel complete. DoW2 is a smaller scaled tactic covering
I hear DoW3 has a lore problem in being sanitized and too P.C.

Go for DoW 1 and go for Soulstorm.
It has a sandbox approach to it campaign that's an acquired taste. It actually grows on you!

Dark Crusade, but with Sisters of Battle, a bit lamer campaign, and flying units nobody uses.
Will you do it for her? I won't.
DEldar are interesting, but I'm not sure who they're for. Maybe for you? They were designed for multiplayer feel somewhat incompatible with stronghold missions.
Speaking of multiplayer, it does exist, but it is split between previous games and 3 big mods, which, in my opinion, are "fun" but terrible and will make you crash. Good luck!

ummm bots are low key op but a lot of fun with friends also when u lose the lat 30 mins of u r life were all a gone

Love this game so much! vanilla or unification I like playing both. definitely would recommend!

Besides the game hanging up on "joining server" alot when doing coop which will most likely get fixed post release, the game is a great time especially with friends

i love dawn of war to death but i only play soulstorm bc of the mods
mostly bc they nerfed the guard and im too dense to understand the planes

6/10 i prefer winter assault

I miss when Dawn of War was good - this is the final game of that era.

I strongly recommend playing awhile with the base game, then switching to the Titanium Wars mod, and then playing the Campaign with it. That's how I had a huge blast with this game, and I recommend it to everyone who has any love for RTS or 40k.

That mod is absurdly good, and the only downside of it is it's a nightmare to get ahold of. Since Steam's rules probably prevent me from directly linking it in this review, all I can say is "Look for the discord server" and "Godspeed to you". It took me two hours to learn about the mod, find the actual place to get the mod, find the password to open the compressed file, install the damn thing and get it running and it was SO WORTH IT, I CANNOT OVERSTATE HOW WORTH IT IT WAS.

Godspeed to you. Maybe one day Dawn of War will be good again, but until that day we still have Soulstorm.

I love clasic DoW, and Soulstorm have bunch of modes so its absolutly amazing

Enjoyable RTS game. If you love Warhammer 40k this is definitely a title worth your time. The age shows a little bit now but that does not detract from the overall playability with multiple factions and strongholds to figure out it's got some replay value.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☑ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

I wish we could go back to these kinda games built like this. Good games, good people, big hands, You better believe it.

He knows it, I know it, we all know it. This game is the greatest. The best. That's a fact, look it up.

I've been hearing for years that Soulstorm's campaign was bad in a lot of ways. Having nothing else to do, I decided to pour some hours into the game and do a complete playthrough of the campaign, to see for myself how bad it actually is.
After going through all of this.....gauntlet, I can confidently say, everything I've heard was an understatement.
Quick pros and cons, to at least give the expansion overall some credit:

PROS:
- Adds the Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle, 2 new races for the campaign, skirmish and multiplayer.
- Models, textures, sounds and voice lines for said new races are all good.
- New maps added for skirmish/multiplayer, which are also utilized in the campaign.
- Balance patches to iron out issues brought up by Dark Crusade regarding certain units and factions (ie Necrons).

CONS:
- The campaign.

To elaborate: Soulstorm's campaign is the single worst RTS campaign I have ever played, maybe second to Tales of the Dragon from Age of mythology. Everything Dark Crusade did right, Soulstorm did wrong. Everything Dark Crusade did wrong (and Dark Crusade did VERY, VERY few things wrong), Soulstorm did not address or fix.
It's incomprehensible to me how Soulstorm can do EVERYTHING WRONG when Dark Crusade existed before it and did everything right. I will list many things below that Soulstorm did wrong (For every point I list, Dark Crusade did right)

-Persistent buildings are no longer a thing: everything you build in the map, while attacking or defending, is pointless.
This is a severe issue. There is no point to actually playing like you would in Skirmish matches because of this. The only viable strategy that's both efficient for your playthrough AND for your sanity, is to take your commander unit and honour guard, and rushing to find and destroy the enemy buildings.

To "address" this issue to a minor extend, the game allows you to reinforce a province you hold with buildings (types of and amount limited). Of course this isn't worth of any praise, as Dark Crusade's persistent buildings beat that feature any day of the week and additionally, thanks to conquering a specific province on the metamap, you gain the bonus of Forward Bases, which function exactly as building garrisons in Soulstorm, but for ATTACKING provinces, not defending them.

-Campaign matches are set to Annihilation instead of Destroy HQ: the game mode "Annihilation" requires you to destroy every building *capable* of unit production. This is without saying, annoying. Not much else to say other than it will waste your time and drag out the duration of a match for a minute or 2 longer.

-Resource disposition on certain maps is completely unfair: some maps, despite being symmetric in every way, will have some requisition points missing, usually on the player's side of the map to put them at a disadvantage over the AI. This isn't common, you'll find more maps with fair resources than ones without, but the few that don't are egregious, with one map on Kaurava 4 (Dark Eldar/Chaos planet) giving the player ONE requisition point, and the AI about 7-8.

-The special provinces that granted unique bonuses are gone: Dark Crusade had special provinces that granted its owner special powers to help them gain an edge over the metamap.
These missions required unique victory conditions to be met, which were not part of the main gamemode roster.
These missions are also absent from Soulstorm. But the concept remains, rather than said Metamap bonuses being relegated to specific missions, they're now tied to the factions themselves, and you can acquire them by wiping out enemy factions off the metamap. This also means that every race starts with said bonus already in their roster.
This isn't necessarily a bad concept and I would have been fine with it, if the Strongholds weren't....awful. But I'll get to that later.

-The design of the metamap: the campaign of Dark Crusade featured a war between 7 races on ONE planet. Every province was connected with one another, making map progress simple for the player, but also the AI. Enemy factions in DC could attack provinces, collect honour guard from conquered territories and even actually wipe eachother out.

The campaign of Soulstorm, on the contrary, features a war between 9 races on 4 planets and 3 moons.
To travel between planets, every planet has 1-2 provinces featuring a webway gate, taking them allows one to move to other webway gates connected to that one specifically. The gamemode for these specific territories is set to Take and Hold, which require you to capture and hold more than 50% of the map's Critical Locations, for 7 minutes. I appreciate the use of different gamemodes to spice up the gameplay though to be frank, I could wipe out the enemy in less time than that, so it quickly becomes a waste of time once the novelty of it being new wears off.

Now here's the major issue. No one ever leaves their planet.
Every faction on their respective planets are in a perpetual stalemate, attacking, defending and moving between territories forever and ever, with no conclusion. They don't attack strongholds. They are forever patiently waiting for the player to wipe them out.
Once you conquer your entire planet from your direct adversary, you are no longer in danger of being attacked or wiped out (save for dark eldar assaults on webway territories).
You can forever skip your turn and rake in planetary requisition from your provinces, with no consequences.

Extra issue with the structure of the metamap, it's small. The surface area of Dark Crusade's playable map covers nearly the whole screen. Soulstorm's on the other hand is tiny. As a result, every planet has very tiny provinces, and in specific conditiosn, you can beat 2 strongholds in as little as 2 turns.

-Honour Guard is now more expensive: thanks to the issues present in the campaign that I listed above, this is purely an annoyance for your next planetary expansion.

-Writing bad : Every single character who exists is written like a moron. The writing and voice *direction* (not acting) is abysmal. Most competently written commander is Vance Stubbs and even his writing is sloppy. Likewise, the narrator's voice direction is completely off.

-Strongholds: the main shitshow of Soulstorm. Dark Crusade ran so that Soulstorm could leap backwards into a ravine and die.
"Side objectives are so crippling to your progress that they become mandatory. They are also (without fail) heavily guarded by many fortifications and units. You are encouraged to make a push with your entire army.
"Ambient enemy waves towards your base ramp up heavily in difficulty.
"The map layout for all of them is very open with many paths, so ambient waves are bound to slip past your force to attack your base, this and the above point encourages (demands) you split your forces to guard your base.
"Your main force now has less power to break through side objectives, artificially slowing down your progress.
If you are noticing contradictions in map design, that's because these points are. You are being punished for playing along and there is no alternative. (Turrets help in strongholds but I finished my playthrough as Dark Eldar, who don't have any, so I had to suffer without them).
The game's writing is so bad it's somewhat hilarious, but not funny enough to justify going through all this pain. Just watch BigDickCheney's videos on the dialogue and skip the basilica of torment that is this campaign.

Aside from the terrible, downright soul-crushing campaign, Skirmish works just fine, and multiplayer too, aside from a few de-synch issues that break a match completely. And of course Soulstorm has the widest and most updated variety of mods to play with.
However, I am reviewing the base game, not mods, so this will be a negative review, especially when Dark Crusade exists and did everything right.
Buy the game on sale and have fun playing skirmish vanilla or modded. Do not touch the Campaign button. Run.

This is hands down one of, if not the best RTS. It's graphics are dated but even as a base game it is wonderful. You command mostly squads that can be reinforced, upgraded and have a morale. They lose morale they are not effective anymore. The campaign is good in 40k style.

If you install the UNIFICATION mod, this game will have its full potential. It not only updates the graphics but also the gameplay.

You have new multiplayer and skirmish modes.

You have a ton of different factions, color schemes, new music, new maps and units. Every wanted an epic battle with titans as an RTS? UNIFICATION got you covered.

As a Farsight fan I was amazed that the latest version features the Farsight Enclaves as a playable faction!
You haven't played dawn of war if you did not try the Unification mod.

Get this game. You won't regret it.

old timey build and shoot with the 40K universe. Both scrimage and campaign. A bit dated in graphics, but the game play still has some kick.

By far the most open and diverse representation of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. Fiew lore inconsistencies but tolerable