To be fair, the strife-ridden Warhammer 40,000 universe can be summed up pretty easily. An offshoot of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle role-playing game, with its futuristic analogues for fantasy Humans, Orcs and Elves (the Space Marines, Orks and Eldar), Warhammer 40000 is gothic fantasy all about good old fashioned battles, blood and death, fuelled by extreme xenophobia, with the aim of interspecies genocide – in space. With rowdy cockney sounding Orks, haughty but scantily clad Eldar Seers and rock hard Space Marines wielding huge tech swords, guns and some of the biggest armoured shoulder-pads the galaxy has ever seen. If there was ever a concept more totally perfect for gaming, we’ve yet to find it.

Despite our teasing, the Warhammer 40000 universe is an incredibly rich one. But of the many developers that have handled the franchise over the years only Relic Entertainment, the team best known for Company Of Heroes, have ever really done it justice. In Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War, Relic’s real-time strategy take on the intergalactic conflict has spawned several expansion packs and a faithful online community of players eagerly awaiting new battles.

With its latest instalment of the franchise, Dawn Of War II, not only has Relic once again captured the spirit of the Warhammer 40000 universe, but it has done it by creating a game that cleverly blurs the lines between the RTS and Action RPG genres, delivering an excellent game play experience. While it’s not perfect, it presents a new breed of RTS far more approachable and immediately gratifying than many in the traditional mould.

All the races of the Warhammer 40000 universe want each other dead – very, very badly – with the kind of irrational zeal usually reserved for religious fanatics or online fan boys. These battles have been raging for centuries, and at the frontlines for humanity are the Space Marines, a quasi-religious and constantly angry brotherhood of soldiers, who’s duty it is to defend Imperial humanity. You take on the role of the Force Commander and your Blood Ravens are the best of the undying Emperor’s, or so we’re constantly reminded by the numerous, mostly bellowed talking-head-in-ahud conversations that propel the story. So when a new alien threat emerges, the all-consuming Aliens inspired extragalactic hive-swarm known only as the Tyranid, you and your troops are called to exterminate them. The troublesome Orks and insidious Eldar see this incursion as an opportunity to stir up trouble for their human enemies, so you’ll have to crush that scum too before destroying the new Tyranid scourge.

Series fans will be pleased to find familiar scowling faces of characters from previous games returning in Dawn Of War II. There’s something of a continuing space opera feel to the story, the taciturn Blood Ravens are like a squabbling band of brothers and there’s the introduction of the long awaited Tyranid race to the game series. For the rest of us, what’s interesting about Relic’s latest take on Warhammer 40000 is that in a universe, and indeed a genre, in which billions of faceless soldiers are traditionally ground up in the iron teeth of conflict, it’s boiled the game’s focus right down to the squad level. Previous instalments of the series did feature more strategic point capturing than traditional RTS base building and resource gathering, but here even all of that is stripped to the bone – you have no base, no power requirements and you’re limited to four squads deployed at any one time. It can initially be a little disconcerting to say the least.

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