Game Cover
For the uninitiated, Dark Crusade's gameplay does a great job of putting the focus on vicious front-line combat by forcing you to quickly send out squads of powerful soldiers to claim strategic points spread across each map. Relatively little time is spent building up a base, so you'll wind up focusing your energy and attention on managing the game's exciting, gory battles. You'll command mighty infantry squads as well as deadly vehicles, and though most units do a good job of acting autonomously when engaged, you'll need to carefully use special abilities and keep an eye on your soldiers' morale as they fight. The design concepts introduced in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War later found their way into Company of Heroes in improved form, but don't expect all those changes in Dark Crusade. For the most part, though, the gameplay still holds up extremely well, as do the game's detailed, imaginative visuals.
Dark Crusade takes place on the planet Kronus, a mysterious world that's drawn out all these different unfriendly factions to set up camp all at the same time. This stroke of fortune promises many brutal battles to come. None of the factions intend to share the planet, not even the imperial guard and the space marines, who've arrived with their own separate missions. As relatively implausible as it may seem for seven different alien races to all be fighting over the same one backwater planet, Dark Crusade does a surprisingly good job of putting its new strategic campaign in context.
You initially choose to command the forces of any of the game's seven factions, as represented by a specific leader character marshaling each of these armies on Kronus. Among the choices are the new additions to Dark Crusade: the Empire of Tau, a high-tech conglomerate of races fighting for what they call the Greater Good; and the Necrons, an ancient and genocidal breed of what can best be described as undead robots. An enthusiastic narrator then explains what your selected race is trying to accomplish on Kronus and what your force's military leader is all about. Also, each time you manage to take out one of the opposing faction's strongholds, you'll get a narrated epilogue that's unique to that combination of races. Then there's an ending sequence for each faction for whenever you finally defeat all six of your opponents, a process that can take a good 10 hours or more, though it'll depend on the difficulty setting you choose. The stories are entertaining and faithful to the spirit of Games Workshop's influential Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi universe, and they make for a compelling reason to play through the campaign multiple times.
