You’re expected to jump back and forth between factions with a toggle button, and essentially have to play two factions at once.

For example, the fourth mission of the Eldar and Imperial campaign involves you having to manage both factions as they compete against each other to do parallel escort missions from one end of the map to the other. Every mission in Winter Assault ’s campaign is bespoke - sometimes even too much so. It was something of a complaint for the original Dawn of War campaign that the goals in question were all basically “play a skirmish map and kill all your enemies,” and the team that put together Winter Assault heard that. The game will give a fairly forgiving introduction to the Imperial Guard, who are new as a playable faction instead of as boutique backup for the Space Marines, but you should expect missions to run you from forty minutes at the absolute low end to an hour and a half or even two hours at most, since it’s not only a high-skill campaign but for storytelling reasons it will have you jumping back and forth, multiple times per mission, between the two factions you’re commanding. Regardless of which set of factions you choose, you’ll be greeted with a fairly complex single-player experience which assumes you’ve played and beaten the original game’s campaign, and are also familiar with the workings of the Orks, Chaos Space Marines, and Eldar. ) Winter Assault gives you the option of playing as one of two doomed alliances: the Eldar and the Imperial Guard, or the Orks and the Chaos Space Marines. (It’s so similar, in fact, that the Winter Assault entry on your steam list is a 70-some KB “installation” that basically just checks to make sure you paid for the content and then passes you back to Dawn of War – Game of the Year Edition. This week we’ll actually talk about those games, and we might be a bit less laudatory.īut not entirely so! We begin with 2005’s Winter Assault, which is frankly a pretty good spiritual successor to the original Dawn of War campaign, both in structure and content. Last week we covered the base Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War game, which made a massive impression on the RTS genre in the early Aughts and inspired three expansion games from 2005 to 2008.

Dawn of war missions