What's impressive about Dawn of War III is how beautifully it manages to communicate the weight, scale, and ferocity of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. From the severe, decaying landscape of its maps, to the radical conservatism of prominent factions and technology that carries a distinctly Gothic edge, no other game based on a Games Workshop IP manages to deliver such a morosely charming combination of grief, rage, and fanaticism.

Given that this is developer Relic's third game in the series you'd expect the design team to have nailed the aesthetic by now, but the visuals are especially striking. Which is not to say that Dawn of War III's charms are entirely superficial. It combines the best bits from the first two Dawn of War games: the dominant, powerful hero units of the second, and the larger armies and strong emphasis on base building and expansion of the original.

I've played just one single-player map—as Blood Raven Space Marines facing off against Eldar—but the relationship between managing the scale of an army and efficiently using each hero's special skills feels perfectly pitched to satisfy fans of the series. Base building and the training of units is simple enough that you're not forced into micromanaging everything, leaving you plenty of time to concentrate on the more exciting task of using hero abilities.

Upgrading and constructing buildings and acquiring new units relies on gathering Power and Requisition points from static platforms that must be found and controlled by troops. This encourages you to explore the immediate area around your base upon starting a level. Many RTS games reward you for turtling and only moving out from your base once you've upgraded everything to the maximum possible degree, but Dawn of War III pushes a much more immediately aggressive approach that's in keeping with the tabletop game it's based on.

















It's that sense that there's always something you should be doing that separates Dawn of War III from its genre peers. Base building, exploring, and fighting aren't isolated activities—you need to concentrate on performing all three simultaneously. There's a chance this could prove overwhelming, but at this point we'd be willing to give Relic the benefit of the doubt that players will be given a fair chance to learn and master the required skills before the challenge ramps up.

Hero characters are strong enough to go out on scouting trips by themselves, while standard units have enough power in numbers to be used to weaken enemy bases before you call in more devastating units to finish the job. Given the comparative strength of heroes in relation to typical Space Marines, it's easy to view the grunts as disposable and use them as a distraction while you position your more valuable units for maximum damage. This style of gameplay seems to be emphasised by how easy it is to replace units lost on the battlefield.

Before I finished my hour-long demo, I'd already succumbed to this system's charms. I built as many soldiers as I could, rushed an enemy base, trained new recruits as the existing ones were dying, and simply repeated the process until victory was gained, all while using a hero unit to explore the map and pick out new targets.

Further, heroes don't actually die. If their health hits zero then you must wait for a cooldown timer to fill up, at which point they return to the map. This is a positive in that it further encourages more aggressive play, but the system does run the risk of heroes becoming disposable given their invincibility. As such, taking care of them becomes secondary to deploying them as a simple battering ram.

Indeed, I found the game a little too easy. It's possible that this could simply be a quirk of the map I was playing, and I have a strong suspicion that the difficulty level had been manipulated to make sure I didn't fail completely, but it does highlight the delicacy of balance required.

Still, there's no denying that what I played was appealing. I want to play more, which is always a good sign. Question marks remain over the finer details of Dawn of War III's combat, but the strength of its aesthetic design, and the reputation of its creators, means that this is a game worthy of heady anticipation.

Dawn of War III is due for release on Windows PC in 2017.