It's been over four years (yes, it's really been that long) since Relic Entertainment's Dawn of War came along and really gave the real-time strategy genre a good shaking up. Gone were the tedious resource harvesting and throw-away units, replaced by a system that made players capture territory for resources, discouraged "turtling" defensive gameplay and made commanders start to value individual units.
The fresh approach to a genre that had arguably begun to stagnate following years of Command and Conquer clones, combined with the rich and gloriously violent setting of Games Workshop's iconic Warhammer: 40,000 universe resulted in a gloriously fun mix of Bolters, Chain-swords and twenty foot high chaos Daemons. The series has since been followed by a truckload of expansion packs (both good and not so good) which have expanded the game to a mind boggling eight playable races.
VGChatz's Taneli Palola: "There's no question that during these years the overall popularity of the genre took a significant hit, as most games within it specialized even further by adding new elements from other types of games into their gameplay loops and consequently became increasingly niche as the years wore on.
However, this doesn't in any way mean that the period was devoid of great games. Quite the contrary, in fact. Arguably some of the greatest RTS titles ever made came out around this time, and much of this was because many developers were increasingly familiar and comfortable with adding new twists and gameplay elements to the familiar formula. As such, even when the genre's popularity dwindled, many studios were still creating excellent and groundbreaking titles almost every year, just for a smaller audience than in years past."
those were fun years red alert star craft command and conquer well when westwood studio made good games before EA brought them like bioware...
Aside from C&C 4, the other C&C's from EA were all good/great. The genre nose dived once Moba's rose in popularity, even Petroglyph Games (ex-Westwood employees) haven't had a hit since Star Wars: Empire at War (2006), all there games got abandoned after launch.
"This week when I was scrolling through my Steam library for a game to play I was stumped, until I found a mod which brought fresh air to an old classic. The game was the legendary Dawn of War series by Relic. The Dawn of War expansions; Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm along with other stand-alone titles like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, give the universe the justice it rightly deserved."
Sega wants to give you even more free games.
