And in Warhammer 40k, above all sci-fi worlds, there is a blinding light, and a drunken orchestra of noise. In a universe without shopping, there is Only War.Īs RTS games go Winter Assault and its parent game are more concerned with being spectacular than they are about being sophisticated, but we appreciate how that works - some games are more about the light and noise than about the cerebral juices. Warhammer's far-future universe is one of pure war, and the countless billions of folk who have nothing better to do are worshiping evil, piloting death-machines or getting high on psychic energies. Ah well, we can't have it all, and in most other respects Dawn of War (as well as Winter Assault) manages to be both nightmarishly vicious and sense-bludgeoning good fun. Games Workshop seems to have a bit of a split personality in that regard: sometimes the Warhammer universe is profoundly grim, and other times those death monks really don't seem so bad. Yet somehow the combative characters of Winter Assault are, for my tastes at least, slightly too cartoonish to sit correctly in relation to the nastiness threshold. The ultra-brutalist battle-goths of Warhammer 40,000 amply satisfy such tastes, especially when they remember to fall on the right side of violent and nasty. How do you like your science fiction? I've always liked it to be completely over the top, and a little bit messy.