'm a big fan of the original Dawn of War; to my mind it was by far the best traditional real-time strategy title in some time. Obviously, I was very pumped for this expansion to come out. However, while the new playable faction of the Imperial Guard is a worthy addition to the Dawn of War universe, Winter Assault didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Though the missions in the single-player portion of the game are fairly long and creative, there are only 12 of them. Also, none of the (admittedly minor) issues that I had with the base game were addressed. This all being said, though, there’s no arguing that this is anything but a good expansion to a great game.

The Imperial Guard, which you’ll play through the most of the Order campaign, are fairly similar to the Space Marines. Dawn of War players will quickly become familiar with them, and they seem well-balanced with the other factions. However, it’s disappointing that they don’t open up any really new avenues of play. For someone like me, who greatly enjoys the variety between Protoss and Zerg, for instance, it’s too bad that this expansion doesn’t do anything to really differentiate the factions to that extent. Not that they’re Warcraft II-like carbon copies of each other by any means, but I can’t help wanting more uniqueness. The brevity of the campaigns (any serious player will roll through all of the single-player content in the matter of a few days) doesn’t help matters, either.

However, these issues are really quite small in the grand scheme of things. More units and maps are always great boons to multiplayer, which is really the big selling point of RTS anyway. If nothing else, this is a solid add-on to a great base game. I just can’t think of anything about it that makes Dawn of War any more of a "must-play" than it already is.