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Back in around 2012 or 2011, I remember seeing this game at a local Best Buy.

The cover immediately intrigued me. The red soldier reminded me of Toa Tahu from Bionicle (from like the 2 people who who still remember Bionicles...but that's a topic for another time). What was this? I thought.

On the back of the box, it showed images of large-scale conflicts between such weird looking units, everything so stylized. I wanted to know more.

I didn't buy it. Instead I went home and found that there was a demo of it on Steam. So I quickly downloaded it and played through the demo level. I was immediately hooked.

It's hard to explain what exactly it was about the setting or the characters of this game that drew my attention so much, but I think it was a mixture of things. At the time, I was mostly a console player since my pc was nowhere near strong enough to run any games (it had a dinky little GT 420 gpu the size of a credit card). As result of this, the genres of games that I played were relegated to FPS, hack and slashes, racing, and fighting games.

I wasn't really exposed to many other types of games like real-time strategies or simulator games. So when I started up the Dawn of War demo, it was like this new frontier. Here I was controlling not just one character, but entire squads! And I had to make decisions for each of them simultaneously.

One of the first things I noticed was how weird the naming of everything was. Sure you had your Space Marines as the bread and butter scifi soldier, but then you had these Servitors who acted as the builder units. Then there were units called Librarians who carried staves with large books and shot lightning out of their hands! And you fought Orkz (not Orcs) who marched in various different sizes and used makeshift...everything.

It got me asking questions about this world, this universe that had such a variety of colorful things. Right then and there, I knew I wanted to get the game. So I went back to Best Buy and grabbed my copy.

To be continued...