I've played 2 of Dawn of War 4's campaigns, and they're everything I hoped they'd be

An RTS is only as good as its campaign. Sure, it's the competitive multiplayer side of things that gives these games their long tail—StarCraft 2 has been the dominant RTS for 16 years for this very reason—but the bulk of initial players will first be seduced by the promise of a killer singleplayer romp. In this regard, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 has the juice.

I've had a couple of weeks to play around with two of the four campaigns—orks and Adeptus Mechanicus—along with the shorter, two-mission prologue featuring the Astra Militarum, and I've been able to set aside my fear that we'd be getting a repeat of Dawn of War 3's issues. Folks, I am loving these campaigns.

Lads, lads lads

Out of the prologue, I signed up with the orks. The greenskins are a good first pick, not just because this campaign comes first in the chronology, but because it's the most straightforward faction. Their units and buildings are the cheapest in the game, and it only takes a few minutes to recruit a basic army right out of the gate. If you just want to smash shit up, the orks are your guys.

This is not to say that you'll be steamrolling everything. You can lose that army even quicker than you recruited it if you just charge in blind. Orks might not be the brightest xenos in the universe, but their ruthlessness and rage is tempered by low cunning—something the campaign narrative leans into.

If you want to make the most out of your green tide of devastation, you'll want to do a bit of recon, figuring out what toys your opponents are playing with. This won't just determine the units you should recruit, but the wargear upgrades you give them as well. Like the tabletop game, you're given a lot of versatility, which includes being able to switch up the weapons on individual units, which in turn lets you handle specific threats more effectively.

The ork campaign is a fun one, full of large green idiots posturing, backstabbing and getting all charged up about the prospect of squashing humies. You'll start as the boss of a local band of angry lads, but then spacefaring orks fall from the sky, and their boss (a familiar face for Dawn of War vets) quickly decides the world of Kronos is his—the native orks aren't really OK with that.

So a lot of this campaign is focused on this competition between the two groups. A particularly great mission sees you competing in a race with this ork interloper. The first side to destroy the Adeptus Mechanicus base wins the race and gets to be the big boss (not that orks are sportsmanlike or tend to honour deals).

The armies are separated and must push up their respective paths, with the UI showing who's winning. It's a brilliantly designed map, with a slight MOBA vibe because of its lane setup, but also featuring some spacious areas for big fights and base building, lots of chokepoints, and some elevated positions that you'll need your Stormboyz to overcome. Across most of it, you're separated from the other orks, but you can still see them pushing their way up the map, which I found even more effective than the UI when it came to lighting a fire under my arse. At the top and bottom of the map, however, the two sides are linked, which inspires a bunch of sneaky backstabbing.

Your opponent starts sending small forces to harass your base, keeping you on your toes, and then your main armies clash at the top of the map, near the Adeptus Mechanicus base. I had a vast green horde and a respectable lead, but the tech priests were able to hold me off for a wee while, giving my opponent time to catch up. It was the best way to end the mission: a climactic battle where I was squished between humans and enemy orks. When the last building crumbled, most of my army was gone, but it didn't matter—I'd won the challenge.

After the race, you pick a side—the local boyz or the invaders—for the rest of the campaign. Some of the maps and objectives are shared between the two paths, but you'll also encounter unique missions, story moments and, of course, you'll have very different commander units to play around with. It's a smart way to solve the one-and-done nature of RTS campaigns—you'll need to play twice to experience everything. And even within the same path, you're occasionally forced to make certain decisions that will affect future missions.

As a tabletop boy, I feel pretty well taken care of in DoW4. Not being a methodical turn-based romp, it's naturally going to feel different, but it's undeniably authentic. There's the adaptation of the wargear system that I mentioned above, of course, but things like stratagems and command points also make their way over from the tabletop version.

Command points can be earned by fighting and taking over capture points, which can then be spent on activating powerful abilities, the aforementioned stratagems. They've helped me turn the tide of battle more than a few times. They're all great. Whether I'm summoning some explosive squigs, calling down a random unit—which naturally obliterates anything in the landing zone—or psychically buffing my entire army by calling a WAAAGH!, stratagems always promise a good time, and they live up to it.

The orks are also just a delight to watch, with their exaggerated animations and colourful model design, flawlessly evoking the tabletop game. Zooming in and watching a melee scrum play out is well worth the sacrifice of battlefield visibility, especially with the synced up animations. King Art has expanded this system, so it doesn't just sync up units when there's a kill.

Now, it doesn't always work as advertised. I often see units flailing around and not hitting anything, but I've also witnessed plenty of flashy duels playing out. Broadly, DoW4's scraps have a high level of physicality, with clashes between forces feeling tangible and tactile. And with a couple of months between now and launch, hopefully it will look even better in the finished build.

Heavy metal

After I finished up with my ork besties, the Adeptus Mechanicus campaign was a big change of pace. This is the first time these nerds have featured in Dawn of War, but good things come to those who wait—whether it's Guinness or tech priests. It's a fun tonal shift from the brutality of the green lads, with the Adeptus Mechanicus being the scalpel to the ork's blunt instrument.

The structure of the Adeptus Mechanicus campaign is similar to its ork counterpart, in that there's a big rivalry that allows you, after a certain point, to pick one of two paths with different commanders. The ork and Adeptus Mechanicus campaigns, and their respective paths, still feel suitably different, however, with bespoke missions and distinct characters giving each a powerful flavour all their own.

Technoarchaeology and immortal machines—that's what you're getting into with the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Imperium's dogmatic tinkerers make for a high-tech, precise army as they attempt to thwart the awakened necron forces on Kronos. Like the ork campaign, it's blessed with lots of variety, boasting plenty of novel missions and deftly avoiding too much repetition.

The tech priests are a ranged powerhouse, certainly compared to the orks, but right from the get-go you'll get access to stealthy melee units that do a great job of locking down ranged enemies or slaughtering foes who are hunkering down behind cover.

Oh yeah, cover is back! Thank the Emperor. Cover was a big part of the first two games, but it got sidelined in DoW3. Relic's third game did technically have a cover system, with small areas that you could capture, after which a temporary shield would offer units inside a bit of protection, but it was a poor system. These locations were few and far between, often placed in areas where they weren't really needed, and the nature of the missions—where you rarely stay in one place for long—rendered them largely useless.

DoW4's approach should keep everyone pretty happy. Every map features barricades, plonked down in sensible spots, and during the more scripted campaign missions they are almost always a sign that an enemy army is going to be charging towards you. They are vulnerable to melee units and flanking attacks, but will keep your ranged units alive for longer.

Orks can actually construct their own barricades, which can be erected anywhere.The Adeptus Mechanicus, meanwhile, aren't left out in the cold. They're able to construct a different kind of cover: Emanatus Field Generators. As you'd expect from a technologically advanced faction with a ranged focus, these are fancier than the basic cover. They absorb melee damage and protect units garrisoned inside them from ranged attacks, and the coverage is 360 degrees, too, rather than being directional.

I got so much use out of the various types of cover, and they can dramatically change the flow of battle and give important roles to specific units. But cover doesn't make units invincible, and it can be destroyed, so there are plenty of ways to deal with protected enemies.

Grenades are handy, of course, and so are fast melee units if you're dealing with barricades. The Adeptus Mechanicus Sicarian Ruststalker or the ork Squighog Boyz can quickly get behind cover and then lock the ranged unit into a fight, completely defanging them and making them vulnerable once more.

All this is to say: cover has a huge impact, both when you're facing it and using it. But it's not the only defensive measure. The Adeptus Mechanicus also has access to a rather impressive bit of tech known as the Void Shield. This bad boy can protect your base from anyone outside the shield, as it's not possible for enemies to shoot through it. They must walk into your base to do damage, at which point they can be surrounded and taken out.

While DoW4 is a pretty fast-paced game, the Adeptus Mechanicus are a touch slower and more deliberate than the orks. While the latter can rapidly plonk down some buildings anywhere on the map and spit out an army, the tech priests take a little longer to get going—but that's not a disadvantage.

See, the Adeptus Mechanicus warmachine is fuelled by the Noosphere Network, a system that links up the faction's buildings, turrets and field generators, and confers a multitude of benefits, improving the efficiency of both their bases and armies. Through relays you can spread the network across the entire map, so distant outposts or defended positions can benefit from the efficiency boost. But these relays are vulnerable, so the bigger the network, the more you need to invest time and resources defending it.

But expand it you must—because the larger the network, the more powerful it becomes, eventually netting you fancy end-game units, research and upgrade options. It's a lovely bit of friction: to become stronger, you must also make yourself a bit more vulnerable. If the enemy takes out a critical relay, you could be screwed.

There's more to consider in an Adeptus Mechanicus playthrough, then, but damn do they have some fun toys to play with—as you'd expect from 40k's most overzealous gearheads. The Knight is a highlight of course—a gargantuan behemoth that towers over the battlefield—and the faction boasts some powerful stratagems, including one that can wipe out an entire enemy force if you time it just right. It's beautiful stuff.

Room for everyone

As a fan of Iron Harvest, which took a lot of cues from original Dawn of War developer Relic, I expected to enjoy DoW4. But a good RTS campaign is not guaranteed, even when it's coming from a proven studio—just look at the last game, which almost killed off the whole series. From what I've played so far, however, I think King Art is onto a winner here.

OK, now it's time to address the elephant in the room: Total War 40k. It's been suggested that Creative Assembly's take on Warhammer 40k will steal DoW4's thunder. I don't see it. First of all, DoW4 is right around the corner, while Total War 40k doesn't even have a release date. They're also just completely different kinds of strategy games.

DoW4 is a classic, pure RTS with a series of mostly linear campaigns and an emphasis on storytelling. It's a smaller scale romp, and probably a bit tighter and tidier as a result. Total War 40k, like all Total Wars, is more like a grand strategy game with real-time tactical pitched battles. There's no base building, the maps are mostly open and the campaigns will be sandboxes.

They are completely different experiences, and there's room for everyone. Indeed, I feel pretty damn lucky to have a new Dawn of War and a new Total War to look forward to—it's a good thing. Take it from someone who's played both. So there's never been a better time to be a 40k fan—that said, between Dark Heresy, Dawn of War 4, Total War 40k and the new battleforce boxes Games Workshop just unveiled, I'm about to be a broke 40k fan.