Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 will be pitting two space marine chapters – the Blood Ravens and the Dark Angels – against the terrifying Necrons, with an assist from their cyborg compatriots in the Adeptus Mechanicus. But while they all brood and scheme and recite litanies, the Orks will be literally crash-landing into the middle of it all in search of good fights and making gory memories. We got to try out a swathe of units and new campaign mechanics, and if there’s one idea that seems to define the faction in this new RTS, it’s this: “Make it bigger!”
The WAAAGH!
The Orks wouldn’t really be the Orks without the Waaagh! mechanic, representing their entire culture and warfare ethos of enthusiastic mayhem. It’s been represented in various ways across many 40K games, but in Dawn of War 4, it’s about as straightforward as the Orks themselves. Waaagh! is a bar that fills up from having lots of units on the field and, of course, from killing lots of humies and Necrons. Or even other Orks! Filling the bar will unlock tactical abilities, but also higher-tier units and upgrades.
The Orks are very much a snowball faction, King Art Games told us. You kind of want to throw everything at the wall, sometimes literally, and let that chaos fuel your war machine. An Ork boy who’s not mixing it up with the enemy is one who isn’t earning his keep. And Ork units tend to be pretty cheap to replace, so you might as well box select them and send them to the front if they’re just standing around.
Ork squads gain veterancy pretty quick, so even losing experienced squads isn’t the end of the world. They’re usually not as potent on a one-for-one basis as a fully veteran Space Marine squad, but they can reach peak performance sooner. And one of my favorite parts of the whole faction is that some of the Orks have veterancy upgrades that actually add more models to a squad. So a fresh batch of Boyz might only consist of a handful, but once the Waaagh! really gets rolling, it’ll look like a proper horde.
When you have enough violent fervor saved up, you can Unleash the Waaagh!, which gives all of your units a frantic offensive power increase for a limited time.
Scrap ’em!
Ork buildings are very much an extension of this playstyle. They’re relatively cheap and fast to construct, any Ork unit can build them, and every single one has some kind of little grot with a machine gun on it at least. There are no zoning laws here. Even Ork grocery stores and kindergartens are designed to be defensive turrets, apparently. So basically, you want to more or less barf buildings out across the entire map as you advance. Most of them aren’t very durable, but if your opponent has to navigate through a valley of scrap piles that are all shooting at them, that’s going to wear them down at the very least.
The core of an Ork army is still the melee Slugga Boyz and the ranged Shoota Boyz, filling out the front with durable but mostly expendable troops that want to outnumber the enemy if possible. When I really needed to hold the line, though, I opted for Beast Snagga Boyz, an even meaner, and slightly more expensive, melee option who can be equipped with mid-range shotguns. I guess you could think of these as the unhinged hillbillies to the Sluggas’ rowdy football hooligans.
The key to a lot of my Orky triumphs, though, actually turned out to be cavalry. Squighog Boyz charge into the fight on the backs of terrifying, sharp-toothed squighogs that are great at finding an opening in an Imperial Guard defensive line. And once they’re stuck into the trenches, well, those poor humies don’t stand much of a chance. For a faction that is best known for mass frontal assaults, I quite enjoyed the more tactical playstyle that these mounted boyz enable.
Wurrboys add a caster option to the roster, while extra-expendable Gretchen and the slightly bulkier Mekboy keep your smoke-belching war machines in working order. The Stormboyz are another option for dealing with hardened defenses, using what is really more of a rocket with some straps on it than a proper jetpack to leap over the top of bunkers and sandbags.
There are plenty of other, more specialized tools in the Ork arsenal, too. Flash Gitz are great at punching through the armor on hapless Space Marines or the various vehicles and mechanical monstrosities the other factions field. The stompy Deff Dread can mix it up with melee superunits that would tear the average ork to shreds. And when you really just need to make a hole in something at whatever cost, Bomb Squigs seem more than happy to sacrifice themselves to take out harder targets and enemy structures.
Orks have never been my main faction in 40K, but it would be hard to imagine Dawn of War without them. They love a challenge, and rejoice in the idea of finding the biggest and strongest foes to test their mettle against, and I can respect that. And I had a lot of fun messing around with them, even if they won’t be my first choice on your average day. Especially seeing my squads of Boyz swell in numbers as they levelled up felt thematically appropriate and fantastically satisfying.And of course, we can’t forget the centerpiece of every Ork incursion: the Warboss. Dawn of War 4 has two of them, actually, with fairly different playstyles and campaign goals. You can learn more about them in our hands-on Ork campaign preview coming later in the month. Until then, you can get a look at the boyz in all their glory in the Ork faction CGI trailer, and learn more about the development of Dawn of War 4 with our developer interviews, all part of this month’s IGN First.
