As you first collide with the game everything comes as a bit of a shock. With all the levelling, inventory management and stat preening it won’t be long before you’re getting a whiff of Diablo in your Dawn of War. It doesn’t take long for it to start making some sense, mind, and concepts of manoeuvring into cover and setting up vantage points become second nature. There’s a knack to it, of course.

Its tactical prowess, however, is thinly spread, as if the developers were trying to spread a proverbial loaf of bread with a measly sliver of jam. Once you’ve sussed the basics (machine guns at the back, melee weapons up front) and the fundamentals in squad positioning, the game never really throws adversity in your direction. Its normal difficulty is a touch on the simplistic side, with some fairly repetitive missions, and its idea of throwing a challenge your way is to give bosses gargantuan amounts of health.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that ramping the game up to the more challenging Primarch difficulty serves up a different experience, where even the Emperor’s finest suit of terminator armour is fashioned out of paper-mâché. The difficulty is there, if you want it, and the extra challenge of the Primarch makes it perfect for co-op mode.

The other half of the game is the multiplayer, where all four races become playable. Online games are deliciously brisk, played in a tight, controlled environment that will be immediately familiar to Company of Heroes veterans – Relic, it seems, have reused the concept. Each team starts with 500 points and a map that is home to three victory locations; capturing and holding more of these locations than your opponent causes his points to count down, and the first to zero is the loser.

It’s all about precise, structured aggression as the only defensive options are retreating and regrouping; even resources are acquired by holding locations on the map. Cover is mandatory, as units left out in the open are little more than cannon fodder. The online community is currently very strong, a virtue to the enduring quality of the game itself, and even though the game uses the rather contentious Games for Windows framework it’s easy to get a decent game. Confusingly, however, support for 2v2 matches online is absent, leaving you stuck with either 1v1 or 3v3.

Its flaws drag it down, which is a shame, and there’s always the niggling truth that while Relic has perfected the framework, they’re missing out on some of the bells and whistles a game of such inherent quality deserves. It’s in desperate need of some more variation, but Dawn of War II is luscious, visceral and fast-paced.

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