Dawn of War Definitive Edition is the best way to play the best RTS today

Supreme Commander is a wonderful artifact, a thing of clockwork precision. But I rarely feel excited to play Supreme Commander. It just doesn't have enough personality; it feels like a beautiful spreadsheet. Age of Empires has more pizazz, but even there a saminess creeps in when I go back for another game and find myself assigning jobs to peasants. StarCraft? Well, StarCraft expects me to care about the protoss and that's just never going to happen.

Dawn of War is the only RTS I still play. The base campaign is a camp delight, character models designed to be seen from a height emoting like puppets while voice actors declaim 40K nonsense as seriously as if it's Shakespeare. What gives Dawn of War longevity though is the Dark Crusade campaign—what could have been a by-the-numbers map-painting exercise transformed into a strategic back-and-forth as the space marines, necrons, tau, orks, eldar, and Imperial Guard carve Kronus up between them.

Each territory you control gives you access to something special, like units you can add to your commander's honor guard by spending requisition points. You can also spend requisition to beef up your defences in conquered territory, though you'll always have the things you built there last time—that persistence really makes the maps feel like yours, with your own personal layout quirks preserved. Requisition can also add extra troops in attack, if you'd rather begin with some power plants or a barracks already in play to get to the good stuff even faster.

Not that Dawn of War delays the good stuff. There's a running gag in Spaced where someone will launch into a long story and the listener will say "skip to the end" like they're holding a DVD remote, and that's how Dawn of War feels compared to other games in the genre. It's skip-to-the-end Starcraft, and all the better for it.

The resource-gathering that sucks so much joy out of other RTS games is largely elided here. Power stations produce power on their own, and requisition points come from map objectives you've seized. The first you just leave to do their thing, and the second you have to get out there and fight for.

Just when you're getting used to Dark Crusade's tug of war, it climaxes in a series of stronghold battles. These unique setpiece maps, broken up with cutscenes, give you a real sense of accomplishment once you dominate them. The ork warboss has several subservient clans to defeat before you take him on, the forces of Chaos have a portal to destroy and devastating blood pulses to avoid, and to defeat the necrons you have to descend into their tunnels, destroy their beacons, plant a bomb in their base, and then get your commander the heck out of there before it detonates.

Great as Dawn of War was, to play it on modern PCs you used to need a widescreen fix and a selection of other fan patches and tweaks. Mods like Unification made it even better, but you'd have to put up with poor performance as a tradeoff for their increased scale, and you had to install even more fan patches to free up the RAM they needed. The Definitive Edition gets rid of the need for any fan patches, even pulling the camera back by default to get rid of Dawn of War's cramped feel. And if you do mod it to add extra factions like the tyranids and extra units like titans, it still runs smooth as silk.

Dawn of War Definitive Edition is the best way to play the best RTS, and even if the genre as a whole doesn't have the cachet it used to these days, it's still worth experiencing what it was like at its height.