Hurtle back through space and time with me, will you, to my living room sofa in 2005. Hunched over, Ork-like and sallow, I used to balance my laptop on one of those nesting coffee tables that was a tiny bit too small, a squeaky little bluetooth travel mouse on the even smaller one beside it. It got so uncomfortable at one point I had to give up on the luxury of my squishy wrist-pad mouse mat, and just wedge a whole cushion under my arm instead. All that for another few minutes running my army around the corners of the map, looking for the final building to demolish, any straggling xenos I’d yet to expunge.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition
- Developer: Relic Entertainment
- Publisher: Relic Entertainment
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Out now on PC (Steam)
The original Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War is one of the all-time greats of real-time strategy. It’s Relic Entertainment, an RTS powerhouse, approaching if not outright hitting its utmost peak, the three brilliant expansions it developed in-house (plus Iron Lore Entertainment’s Soulstorm later on), arriving at just the same time as its equally superlative first Company of Heroes. To look back on that time now – an early teenager, surfing the early-ish, pre-algorithmic internet, playing a favourite genre in a pomp we’ll probably never see again – is to summon that phrase which increasingly feels like the defining cliché of life as an older millennial. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Anyway, I’ve got that out of my system. Back to the grimdark violence of the far future! Dawn of War was and is brilliant because it is just frightfully silly. In writing that, I can hear a thousand mouths cry out in pain, as I think the Aspiring Champion put it. For many, Warhammer is serious business. But not me. Ye olde editor of mine Martin Robinson used to describe 40K as like Tonka Toys for grownups, as if the little models were something you’d imagine smashing together while making duf-duf-duf noises and giggling with glee. I’ve never been able to see it another way since – no faction captures it more than the flag-bearing Space Marines, being all domed shoulders and coned shins and big, cool trucks. Dawn of War was intricate and keenly balanced and vast, but it was also simple. What if you could play your goofy pre-teen imagination, and what if doing that was awesome?
Dawn of War – Definitive Edition, which has just released, was more than enough of an excuse to return. As a remaster it’s a pretty low-key one. For everyday users arguably the biggest fix is the one made to the previously clunky choose-your-resolution options on start-up. There were no good options, for anyone not playing on a monitor from 2005 (Dawn of War and the first expansion, Winter Assault, are 4:3 aspect ratio for instance, and Dark Crusade onwards just stretched-out versions of that), where now it scales nicely all the way up to 4K.