Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Winter Assault (Gamer's Choice) previews

Great game, the new faction: Imperial Guards rock!!! I know it says its the most “turtling” type of race in DoW, well, its actually much better as a rusher. TRust me, if you have Dow and not WA, your missing out on the Chaplain for Space Marines, Khorne Berserkers for Chaos, Mega-Armoured Nob squad for Orks, and the Fire dragons for eldar, and missing out is not good. I mean…WHOA…thats alot of new things for one little expansion pack. Some people think “nah…its stupid, i don't like the Imperial Guards” Wel, its their loss, but it's so much better though, especially the new units for each race. An a whole new race. It's easy to get addicted

To be honest, I didn't even finish the game as I found it so not fun. I liked Dawn of War, but one complaint I had was all the missions were the same. You start out with a base, defend it until you build up your force then smash the enemy. Winter Assault makes me realise how much I miss that kind of battle. In most missions you have to make do with what you start with, or you have a rather limited capacity to build more. Which sucks. It's also cranked up the difficulty with Red Alert style hang-on-until-reinforcements-arrive-in-six-minutes sort of missions, which I don't find fun at all. I don't like time limits at all and that was one thing that rocked about DOW, there weren't any. It's obviously an attempt to add variety but I think it's spoiled the game completely.

It's also much more hectic with swarms of infantry pouring into battle almost constantly. The heightened difficulty also causes performance issues, as there's so many enemies on the screen at once.

The units and maps are well detailed but I prefer the maps in DOW.

The Guardsman's con­stant “On my mark… On my mark… On my mark…” as you order them around drove me nuts too.

One really annoying thing in DOW was that to zoom in you need a mouse wheel. I don't have a mouse wheel and there's no keyboard control to zoom in and out . I would have thought they'd have fixed that, but no.