Maybe the best way to understand the kind of game Dawn of War 4 wants to be is through a single button. If you're playing a campaign mission in DoW 4 and you're not really feeling it, or you made a silly mistake right at the end and got summarily wiped by the AI, or maybe you're in a hurry and just really curious about what happens next in the story, you have a quietly revolutionary option to hand: you can just hit the 'skip mission' button, and move on.

Dawn of War 4's game director, Jan Theysen explained the thinking to me like this: "In the end, we feel it's not that we want the player to play, necessarily, the game we envision for them. It's more like: here is the thing you can play with, and have fun."

That line of thought seems to permeate Dawn of War 4 in all kinds of places, and in turn makes it come across as incredibly generous. My most recent time with the game, for instance, focused on the campaign and the skirmish mode. The campaign alone is massive. It has four sub campaigns within it, one for each faction, their stories linking to form one grand narrative surrounding the planet of Kronus - returning here from the original Dawn of War's cult favourite expansion, Dark Crusade. Any one of those four campaigns is, according to developer King Art Games, longer than the entire original Dawn of War campaign. And within each there's at least one fork in the road, where you make a choice leading you down one of two mission paths.

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