TL;DR – Dawn of War: Soulstorm is one of my, if not my favourite RTS game of all time which is saying something considering I’ve beaten around 100 of them. It combines 9 asymmetrical factions with fast paced gameplay, a huge selection of maps, decently challenging AI and a fun campaign mode while remaining (largely) faithful to the lore, tone and setting of the W40K universe. Unlike many RTS games it deftly side-steps a common trap wherein the starting stages of each skirmish or mission feel like a glorified base building exercise, while encouraging constant battles by spreading it’s resource points across the map. As if that wasn’t enough, the game also has an active modding community and a small but die hard multiplayer fanbase, who are still playing the game over 15 years later.

Quick Note(s) – Unfortunately the game can have some issues running on Windows 11, so be sure to run the “vcredist_x86” installer located in the Steamapps/common/Dawn of War Soulstorm/VCRedist folder. If you aren’t running the Steam version, you’ll need to download and install the Microsoft C++ visual redistributable 2005. As for those of you who are looking for mods, I’d highly recommend the Unification Mod which adds a disgustingly large amount of units, factions and maps to the game. Other mods are also available on moddb.com (just follow the previous link and click on “Dawn of War” underneath the name of the mod).

Back in those simpler, halcyon days of 2004 the developers at Relic took the (Warhammer) world by storm by releasing the original Dawn of War game. Now this wasn’t the first Warhammer 40,000 (W40K) game by any means, and in fact it was the 8th game to be released that took advantage of the setting. What it did do however, was enable players to play as multiple factions within an immersive setting (sorry Rites of War fans, but that game was slowwww and not particularly immersive) that was fully 3D. The combination of three popular factions – and the Eldar too – resulted in a hugely popular RTS game, especially as both the gameplay and audio design were excellent. Unlike the other goliaths of the space, such as Starcraft, C&C Generals and Age of Empires 2, the game was fast paced and highly rewarded an aggressive play-style, as resource nodes were spread across the map and holding them was the key to victory. In many other RTS games, resources were spread around but generally you’d need to build up your forces and faff around with villagers to build up the structures required to properly begin harvesting the tiberium/cash/gold/whatever. In Dawn of War however, you just needed to capture them with infantry and while it was encouraged, you rarely had to fortify them with a listening point structure (which would need to be destroyed before the enemy could capture it). This subtle little twist meant that it was your army not your villagers that were responsible for growing your economy. Compounding this design decision was the fact that you needed to control as much of the map as possible to receive these resources, as tech upgrades played a minimal role in the economy side whilst your builders could barely do anything (although the secondary power resource was entirely generated by the buildings they constructed). Of course this led to the game giving more aggressive players a significant advantage, which meant that the games were often quick and fast paced with the loss of your army often ensuring you’d lose your resource points which then meant that you were at a resource disadvantage which would then result in you getting ground down under waves of enemy forces. There was a mechanic to compensate for this (slightly) wherein resource points and power generating structures would decay over time, enabling turtles to cling on and eventually negate much of the disadvantage they were facing, but this mechanic in most cases took too long to have a significant effect on the battle.

Captured points produce requisition (blue flag), which means more units. Also you can build Listening Posts on captured points that can be upgraded with turrets

Without going into excessive detail, I’ll briefly explain the mechanics of Dawn of War for those who haven’t played any of the games in the series. Like most RTS games you start with a mere HQ and a builder unit, who can then produce all of the production buildings in your faction alongside power generators and listening points. You’ve got multiple unit classifications (such as heavy infantry, demons, vehicles and so on) but generally there are 3 main types of unit on the battlefield. Infantry (who are the only ones who can capture requisition points), heroes/characters that are powerful but can get bogged down in combat, and then vehicles which are powerful and often heavily armoured but are require lots of power and aren’t available in the early stages of the game. These units are then either focused on melee or ranged attacks. Most weapons are good against certain types of units, with anti-tank weapons often (but not always) being hopeless against infantry and vice-versa. Furthermore each unit can have multiple abilities, and most units can purchase upgrades that are applicable to that one unit. There are also a range of technologies which can be unlocked that provide a bonus to all units of a certain type, both those you currently have and those you might build in the future. All infantry units can be reinforced to add squad members, which costs resources and requires a modest wait as they’re produced. Units in combat suffer a big penalty to reinforcement times but they can still be reinforced. As for the resources, you’ve only got two to worry about. Requisition (the main resource) and power (the secondary resource), which are obtained through captured points on the map & listening posts and power generating structures respectively. Finally there are two types of points on the map(s) worth noting – Relics which let you build your superheavy unit (max 1 at a time) and critical locations which you can’t build anything on or next to. As such the game revolves around building infantry squads to capture points to gain requisition, so you can afford to build power generators which will let you build your more powerful units and begin unlocking research items.

A well balanced Chaos Army with late game units advances on their prey

With that hasty summary out of the way let’s return to the review. Back in 2004 Relic decided that they should continue to build up momentum after the launch of the original Dawn of War by engaging in a classic strategy which has largely (but not entirely) been neglected in recent years. They did this by releasing two expansion packs, Winter Assault (WA) in 2005 and Dark Crusade (DC) in 2006. The former added the Imperial Guard race to the game and added some new maps, a handful of new units for the existing races and two short but challenging campaigns. The latter was considerably more ambitious and included two races in the form of the Necrons and the Tau Empire, while also adding new maps, units and more importantly totally overhauling the campaign structure. Both the base game and WA had fairly standard RTS campaigns, taking the form of around a dozen maps (in WA’s case spread between the two campaigns) that weren’t particularly connected with each other and were basically skirmish maps with some extra challenges and timed NPC spawns/attack waves. Oh and of course they had little cutscenes, which elaborated on the plot and served to motivate you. DC on the other hand replaces the standard campaign structure with a new hybrid campaign that features a turn-based map comprised of multiple regions, each of which needs to be taken in skirmish battles. Each faction can move their single army (represented by their command) across one region per turn, and if this region isn’t owned by them then a skirmish battle will break out. Each region has a strength ranking associated with it from 1 to 15, which determines the AI difficulty and number of AIs to be faced on that map. The difficulty of these maps ranges from one easy AI through to three Hard AIs, with the maps themselves being the same that you encounter in the Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. Every faction is present at the start of the campaign within their stronghold region, a bespoke custom map that is particularly challenging and if these strongholds are conquered then that faction is defeated. As these armies fight across the map they’ll gain new regions which enable them to recruit “Honor Guard” units that are stronger versions of regular units and which spawn with the commander in every battle (unless they’re wiped out in which case they need to be bought again). Some of these regions even offer a faction wide bonus instead of a new honor guard unit, such as enabling you to attack any region except strongholds in one turn or to enable you to spend resources on building structures before an attack begins. Finally there are also feats that commanders can achieve such as winning 3 battles or killing a certain amount of enemies, which give them war-gear points that can then be spent on… war-gear which grants them more health, attack and some other benefits or even abilities. Victory is achieved by eliminating every other faction from the map, which means you’ll need to win every stronghold battle.

This war-gear also changes the appearance of your commander, which is a neat touch

Dawn of War: Soulstorm (DoW:SS) continues this trend and by and large as the campaign is the same, with one big difference. Namely that you now need to defeat eight other factions instead of a measly six. As a consequence the campaign is lengthier, even if the gameplay itself hasn’t changed very much. There are also a few more bonus regions, so that there’s roughly one per faction alongside more stringent routing between areas (i.e. the map now has more choke-points) which gives the campaign a modicum of extra strategy. These two new factions in the form of the Sisters of Battle and the Dark Eldar are of course one of the major selling points of the game, as at the time of release every faction with models was represented with the exception of the Tyranids. Much like the rest of the factions these two have their own unique units and voice acting although I must confess that I’ve always found the Sisters of Battle to be a bit boring. You see both the Sisters and the Dark Eldar have ways of gathering up a special resource (faith and souls respectively) that enable them to activate abilities, but generally these abilities don’t do that much. For the Dark Eldar these abilities are on your toolbar and can be popped at any time and anywhere that you have vision, and while the ability to enable a squad to detect infiltrated enemies is useful, the rest are kinda meh. As for the Sisters of Battle these abilities are used by certain squads and often require that you research a piece of technology to permit them to be used, with these abilities also being kinda… meh. To gather these resources you either build upgrades on your listening posts (Sisters of Battle) or have to send your builders to gather souls (Dark Eldar), with the former being super boring and the latter being a potentially interesting mechanic that gets squandered. This is because the Dark Eldar buildings can build themselves, the builder only has to start the construction process and is then free to go do something else. So far, so good as this fits with the asynchronous nature of the factions within the game. One of these buildings can be upgraded to produce souls though, so what ends up happening is that you build up your base, build a couple of these buildings (which are required for increasing the amount of squads and vehicles you can field in battle) and then have your builder sit in your base gathering souls. There’s no risk/reward ratio to consider from having your slaves wander around the battlefield, but then again as previously stated the abilities kinda suck anyway so it’s not a big deal really. Either way even with these lame abilities I still think the Dark Eldar are the more interesting faction, especially as their most basic infantry unit can infiltrate (letting them turn invisible and still attack enemies).

The campaign map is split into these regions, with the lines showing how to move from planet to planet. You can also see my Honor Guard in the top-right area

As for the other big selling point of this game in the run up to release, it’s also a bit underwhelming. Across Dawn of War and the first two expansions all units had been ground units (well except a handful of hovering ground units), which meant that the inclusion of Flying Units in Dawn of War: Soulstorm was HYPE. Unfortunately the engine just can’t handle flying units and as such these aircraft basically just acted as hovering ground units, which were still cool but were also just vehicles that could ignore some terrain. Ironically enough the developers of Dawn of War: Soulstorm (at this point the original developers at Relic were working on Dawn of War 2 and as such this expansion was outsourced to Iron Lore studios) didn’t want to add “flying” units initially and instead had planned to add some units that were commonly requested by the community. Sadly Relic insisted that Iron Lore get to work adding flying units, which while still useful and having some minor battlefield uses were relatively half-baked and a disappointment for many players. The Imperial Guard for example were bequeathed an aerial bomber, but it couldn’t really conduct bombing runs and as such just hovered around occasionally using a souped-up grenade ability. In spite of these flying units being half baked however Dawn of War: Soulstorm remains the definitive edition of Dawn of War, as it has everything that the other games had alongside a lengthier campaign, even more maps, more factions and of course more units. As a consequence of being the most feature complete Dawn of War game, it’s also the one that still retains an active community both in terms of being able to find multiplayer matches and with regards to the modding community which is still adding new races, maps and units to the game to this day.

As you can see, my “Assault Fighters” are more “Assault Floaters”

Which of course begs the question, why is Dawn of War: Soulstorm still so popular? Well aside from the gameplay as mentioned earlier, and the sheer variety of units and races that you can play as, the game also has a handful of features which have kept players coming back. Part of the game’s enduring popularity is the way in which the game has managed to faithfully and accurately capture the W40K setting, with it’s bombastic units and fantastic voice acting. While strong voice acting is not unique to Dawn of War: Soulstorm, the game is absolutely brimming with memorable quotes delivered well by actors who clearly relish their roles. Every single unit is quotable and while they don’t have a huge pool of quotes, there are enough to avoid repetition whilst not too many that they fail to remain lodged in your mind. The depth and range of the performances are strong, while the writing clearly reflects an understanding of the lore of the W40K universe. There are some weird quirks in the game’s narrative, such as the Imperial Guard stronghold having legions of ostensibly rare Baneblade tanks and that weird screed against Metal Boxes by the Chaos commander, but generally the tone is faithfully conveyed and each unit and character acts as they should. Bolstering this performance is a handful of canny gameplay decisions, such as engaging (almost) every unit to engage in either melee or ranged combat, which ensures that even weaker units can successfully bog down stronger foes in ranged combat or try to force them to run around in circles. The game also has a “sync kill” system wherein units have special, pre-baked animations which play when they defeat enemies in melee combat. While these help to give the game some cinematic flair, they also have a strategic purpose as units are immune to damage while these animations are playing which can be abused to tank certain enemy weapons for the benefit of your less durable units. The combination of asymmetric factions, a high variety of units, fast paced gameplay and a host of little ways to tip the scales of a battle produce an engaging and enjoyable game, while the beginner AI settings are generous enough that newbies don’t need to fear getting completely and utterly stomped.

Lore accurate depiction of how many Guardsmen will die to defend an objective

To summarise then Dawn of War: Soulstorm is an enduringly popular game because it is the successor to a great base game and two expansions which were of an equally high quality. By taking everything that had gone before it with regards to a strong, fast paced gameplay system that offered plenty of tactical depth across all nine factions the game ended up being a complex RTS experience that was still eminently approachable. Unlike many of it’s contemporaries the game was able to bypass a slow starting phase and encourage players to dive straight into the action, which had a strong blend of melee and ranged units to keep matters broadly balanced. This was then reinforced by an AI system that starts off weak enough to not overwhelm noobs, while being difficult enough at the higher levels that the game provides a significant challenge. Add to this a lengthy and replayable campaign mode, alongside fantastic voice acting that helps to immerse the player and you have a vast and engaging RTS game. The fact that the game has a huge quantity of maps, units and mods only cemented it as a long-lasting game that is suitable and indeed recommended for all RTS fans. If you’re a fan of the setting Dawn of War: Soulstorm is still one of the most commonly recommended games nearly 15 years on, whilst RTS players would be remiss to skip it. Even those without much experience with the setting or the genre should give this game a shot, as it’s approachable, memorable and riddled with content – plus it’s exceedingly cheap due to it’s age.

By Boabster

Your favourite fat Scottish game blogger and WordPress "developer". I've been playing games for 25 years, reviewing them for 2 and tracking them on this website.