I just finished the original Dawn of War's campaign, without any of the expansions or sequels.

Story and Presentation: Ever vigilant!

The story is actually good, in a Real Time Strategy! Passable is usually the best you'll get for stories in this genre. It makes sense that the story is good here, as it was made by the creators of Homeworld, another RTS with a strong narrative and audio design.

Dawn of War's campaign is a character focused story, with a rather unusual theme for a game: A crisis of faith. The main characters are part of a holy order called the Space Marines, essentially crusader knights IN SPACE! With guns and tanks. The setting, first created in 1987, is what you'd get if you took the movie Starship Troopers, and mashed it together with all the Heavy Metal album covers. A 90s kid's dream. Explosions, gore, people thrown around like rag-dolls. Tanks, robots, demons, and giant football hooligans. All in the rubric of military science fiction.

The voice acting for this game is 10 out of 10, with many memorable lines, and voices from the units. Overall the sound design and visual presentation is fantastic (even if you may need to edit a file to fit it to your screen resolution). The factions are brimming with personality, each with a distinct and good art direction.

Gameplay: Well paced, action packed, strategic.

The game teaches you everything to know as you play the campaign, gradually introducing the mechanics.

The moment to moment action is thrilling, explosive, and feels like a big action set-piece in a way that many RTS games fail to. The great thing here, is the focus on hand to hand combat. Almost every unit has both a ranged and melee attack. Every unit is good at one or the other, and good at killing either infantry or vehicles (to the point where attacking the wrong target hardly makes a dent, though anti-vehicle explosives knock-back infantry). This adds to the tactical depth. For instance, a habit I got into, was keeping one task group of melee combatants (re-spawning commanders, melee units such as knock-em sock-em dreadnoughts), a second group of general purpose ranged infantry and tanks (rocket equipped infantry hang back so don't need a separate group), and sometimes a third group of jet-pack troops to jump behind enemy lines and distract strong ranged forces.

The way this game handles squads is phenomenal. Rather than healing their health, for most of the game, you instead supply reinforcements and upgrades to individual soldiers in a squad, selecting from multiple different weapons for different situations. Just enough variety to keep things rewarding. This makes the 'standard infantry' (Space Marine Squad), my favorite unit in the game, for their versatility.

Most RTS follow the same static formula: Turtle up building resources, and then move one mob of forces around the map. Dawn of War (and the successive Company of Heroes series), changed this up, while actually increasing the scale of battles. You have to look around and capture strategic points to get any resources, thus, most of the map sees plenty of use, and fortifying forward bases gives a strong sense of progression. You will naturally find yourself splitting your forces considerably, something suicidal in most RTS, but smart to do here. Instead of worker units absently harvesting resources, they fortify resource points. I used Land Speeders, a fast unit, to relieve resource points that are under attack, while my main forces would advance. Every unit has a worthwhile role in battle, through the whole session. So, there are no dead weight unit types.

In conclusion: A classic game with cathartic action, and a good introduction to the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

I've got the expansions and will definitely play them soon! Definitely looking forwards to risk style campaigns as every faction in Dark Crusade.