Disclosure: Feral Interactive gave us a free copy for review purpose.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III was originally developed by Relic Entertainment and released on Windows last April 27, 2017. It was ported to Linux on June 8, 2017 and becomes Feral Interactive’s third Linux game for 2017. Warhammer 40,000 is one the longest-running game franchises and it’s another good addition to the growing game library of Linux.
Performance
The game has a built-in benchmark that runs for about 35 seconds and reflects real-world game play. It is accessed from the graphics options in the main menu. The benchmark logs the frame rate data (average, minimum, and maximum) and the frame time data onto .csv files which can be found here:
.local/share/feral-interactive/Dawn of War III/VFS/User/AppData/Roaming/My Games/Dawn of War III/LogFiles
We used Libre Office Calc, a spreadsheet program, to derive the frame rate over time. The results shown below are the average of 3 runs.

[/tab] [tab title=”CPU Scaling”]

[/tab] [tab title=”Vulkan vs OpenGL”]

[/tab] [tab title=”Ultrawide”]

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An expensive gaming PC is not needed to play the game. According to Feral Interactive, Core i3 4130 paired with GeForce GTX 650 Ti is the minimum required hardware to play the game. Based on our testing, the budget-friendly gaming PC build for March 2017 should suffice for playing Dawn of War III at 1080p (1920 x 1080 resolution) with good image quality.
Game Content
The game features a campaign mode in which you play through a story across 3 different factions – Space Marines, Orks, and Eldar. You are forced to use a specific faction with each mission and the first 3 missions serve as a tutorial on the key differences among the 3 factions. A separate tutorial mode is also available for those who have never played any strategy game before.
Each mission starts with an Elite unit which you can think of as Heroes in DOTA 2. Elites inflict high damage and are equipped with powerful crowd-control skills. They are accompanied by a worker and some basic units in the early part of each mission. Death of an Elite does not result in mission failure and it can be re-spawned after a certain amount of time.
You expand your army by building structures and acquiring unit upgrades featured in each structure. What sets this game apart from other real-time strategy games is the way resources are gathered. You don’t send a worker unit to mine resources then bring it back to the camp. The map has Resource Points which you need to capture and you would sometimes encounter enemies along the path going to the Resource Points. Once captured, it will continually generate resources that you can use for constructing buildings and upgrading your army. Capturing more Resource Points and upgrading them increases the rate at which you accumulate resources.
The battles in campaign mode are fun to play but requires careful attention to each unit. You cannot just focus on your Elites to successfully complete missions. Even though Elites can absorb a lot of damage, they can easily die if you recklessly attack waves of enemies. Elites must be supported by other units during combat and managing the skill of each unit gets tedious as your army grows larger. My only complaint on the campaign mode is some of the maps are designed in such a way that there isn’t really much room for using various strategies.
Multiplayer mode is for those who want to jump right into a battle with more available units and more resources at the beginning. You can play offline against enemy AI or play online with your friends. Unfortunately, cross-play with Windows is currently not supported which means you can only play online with Linux users and Mac users if you are playing this game on Linux. Hopefully, Feral Interactive can fix it in the upcoming game updates.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III is a good game. It may not please every fan of strategy games but it’s a game that proves there are still game developers who are not afraid to try something different and not just continue milking a formula that has been successful before. I already spent about 8 hours into the game and it is enjoyable enough to make me want to finish the campaign mode. Feral Interactive has done a great job of porting this game to Linux. It runs well on GeForce GTX 970 which is still a very popular GPU and the Vulkan implementation is stable enough that I didn’t encounter any game crash or system freeze.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III currently sells for PhP 1,559.95 at Steam and is also available at The Feral Store for $59.99. Like with other Linux ports of Feral Interactive, the game supports Steam Play which means you only purchase the game once and can be played on Linux, Mac, and Windows.