LinuxGameCast Reviews – Dawn of War 3

Your intrepid heroes travel to Vulkan, rebind keys, and talk about Starcraft. Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 3 faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 3
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/285190/
Devel: Relic Entertainment / Feral Interactive
Engine: Essence Engine 4.0
Price: 59.99 / CDN 71.99

Wazzat: Step into a brutal battle between three warring factions In Dawn of War III you will have no choice but to face your foes when a catastrophic weapon is found on the mysterious world of Acheron.

Disclosure: Feral sent us keys.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Running @ 1080 /w everything on high is holding 60 in-game.
45-50 in multiplayer.
All with Vulkan.
However.
The Intel only sys requirements when the R7 has been out since March and the R5 since April is straight-up amature hour.
Like it or not you’re going to have to learn how to AMD.

J-

The vulkans! They work!

P-

That menu jank, though.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Have you played Dawn of War II, Chaos Rising, or Retribution?
Then guess, fkn, what… you already know what it looks like.
Not good, not bad, just your standard RTS fare.
I have to agree with jordan on the voice acting.
That business is legit, at least in the single player campaign.

J-

The voice acting is solid and gets the point across. Warhammer dialogue can get pretty goofy at times
Visuals wise, this doesn’t do anything to distinguish itself from the hundreds of other RTSes that have been released in the past 10 years
Occasionally, you go “Ooh! Cool! A titan! A dreadnought!”, but that’s more recognition than any specific visual acumen
Plus things get a wee clusterfucky when large numbers of units are involved

P-

They let you customize the colors of your units.
But you never get to see any of that in the heat of things.
In fact, unless you zoom all the way in, the only way you have to tell your units apart from the enemy is the color of the HP bar floating above each squad.
Still, when you do zoom in or you get one of the Titan units everything looks really good and easily identifiable.
The voice over also have just that right amount of camp and cheesiness to it to make everyone sound like they were born and raised in the 40K lore.

Total-

Control

V-

I hate games that don’t have WASD for movement with a passion.
Oh, you can rebind all the things but prepare to spend an hour re-rebinding all the other bullsh*t somewhere elks.

J-

I get that the qwerasdzxc keys are used for the unit and building hotkeys, but goddamn, I’d just really like to be able to pan with WASD

P-

Total-

FUN

V-

Warhammer is just like sportsball.
The slightest mention of either in the vicinity of a proper fan will cause you to get an ear full.
When you explain you only have a passing interest (casual) they will happily point you to guides so you can become more fan.
This is DAW for babbys and if we’re being honest it’s even too dumbed down for my enjoyment.
The single player campaign is basically an overextended tutorial.
Multiplayer OTOH is absolutely fantas…. hahahahahah I’m just FKN with ya.
On Windows this critter averages 1K players.
On Linux you only play against people you have scheduled games with.
Even if you do hook up, the available multiplayer modes are balls boring.
So, what is it? Well, it’s
Collect resources, build shit, attack, the game.
Basically Dune 2 minus the nostalgia.

J-

They dun made starcraft
Which is fine, starcraft is a perfectly fine RTS, but DOW 2 made a fantastic change by focusing just on squad management as opposed to all the micromanagey stuff that bogs down most RTSes
Apparently, most people didn’t like that, so they brought number 3 back to a more traditional RTS, while still keeping some of the squad stuff tacked on
And it feels super tacked on
Ultimately, anything I say though will be just comparing it to starcraft, which is kind of ironic considering 40k was the basis for starcraft
And when it boils down to it, I didn’t find star craft all that fun

P-

And they fucked it!
I really enjoy Dawn of War 2.
It’s the game I keep on my laptop for when I have an hour or so to kill
Dawn of War 3, on the other hand, shirks the squad focus, which made its predecessor more of a strategy RPG, and brings back the usual RTS mechanics.
Streamlined as the resource collection may be, I get to the point where I have enough to spawn a boat load of units, select all and then plow my way toward the objective marker. Hoping the objective was one of the things that died or exploded on the way.
I loathe pure real time strategy games and Dawn of War 3 is just that!
No advanced resource management, everything is boiled down to basics, and the Squad management aspect, which had me singing the praises of Dawn of War 2, has been toned down as well.
Gone are the loot and equipment drops and all you do is the standard “unit upgrade” which I’m not entirely sure does anything.
This isn’t an issue with Warhammer or 40k specifically, it’s an issue I have with RTS games.

Total-

Final –