The Sisters are most notable for such downright spooky units as the Penitent Engine, which consists of a heretic strapped to the front of a crucifix bot loaded with flamethrowers, and a faith resource that juices what amounts to battlefield spells. Here, the two new sides are the fanatically religious Sisters of Battle, a group of pissed-off space nuns who take Catholic guilt to a whole new level, and the sadistic Dark Eldar, who chow down on souls for fun. The big additions to the Warhammer 40K family are, once again, two more factions and a nonlinear campaign based on a Risk-style turn-based tactical map.
When you get right down to it, Soulstorm is pretty much a carbon copy of Dark Crusade.
Guts, gore, and plenty of gunplay are the hallmarks of every campaign mission. Only the presence of tried-and-true action-packed gameplay, along with the introduction of two new factions and an expanded nonlinear campaign, elevates the proceedings above a feel-good exercise in recycling, and these elements are so similar to those introduced in Dark Crusade that you're guaranteed to have a couple of flashes of deja vu. Consequently, this stand-alone add-on has a been-there, done-that vibe. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm, the third and presumably final addition to the four-year-old real-time strategy franchise based on Games Workshop's billion-dollar tabletop-game system steals its best moments from 2006's fantastic Dark Crusade expansion.
