While playing Dawn of War 3, there are times when I'm transported back 20 years, to the first flush of real-time strategy's '90s boom. A character urges, "we're under attack." It's very much like an Orc in WarCraft 2 (1995), scuttling away from a marauding herd of Paladins. Although the RTS has changed little in terms of basic format, the details have been tweaked so fundamentally, that the genre has been deceptively transformed. Few developers have done more to effect this transformation than Relic, which, since its founding in 1997, has dedicated itself almost entirely to one genre. Relic Entertainment Dawn of War 3 Through the Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War series, and its World War II kin Company of Heroes, Relic has tweaked and refined the RTS, forever...

Mass Effect: Andromeda is nearly here: The game launches on March 21. Polygon has already spent considerable time with BioWare’s latest alien romance simulator (with a side of action gameplay), and we’ve recorded our first hour with Andromeda above. Watch us get introduced to Commander Ryder, the new hero of the fourth Mass Effect game. It’s the first time fans will play as someone other than Commander Shepherd, but we think they’re going to like her ... or him, depending on which choice they make. (We went with the lady Ryder.) Although customizing Ryder typically takes way, way longer than our video suggests, thanks to all those options, we jump into the game itself for a taste of how Andromeda plays. As we wrote in our preview late last month, there’s a lot to figure out about the...

Last week, I spent a few hours in the company of Battlefield 1's new expansion, They Shall Not Pass. As you can see from the video above, there's no let-up from the frenetic and bloody action of the core game. With close-quarters combat a major component of this DLC, it's an extremely challenging, die-a-lot offering, even for the most accomplished of players. This multiplayer release introduces a key component missing from the original game: the French Army. When most of us think of World War I, we tend to picture the Western Front, much of which took place on French land. Electronic Arts / DICE Battlefield 1: They Shall Not Pass This addition is entirely satisfying, with French voices, uniforms and weapons adding a sense of authenticity to the often...

Arma 3, the latest entry in the long-running military simulation series from Bohemia Interactive, celebrated its fourth year with a machinima contest. The winner, titled “Brass,” shows off the evolution of the underlying game engine, and the dedication of its modding community. Arma 3 entered Steam’s Early Access program four years ago. When it finally released, in 2013, it was somewhat incomplete. Since that time, the team behind it has followed on with a series of updates, including last year’s Apex expansion which added new vehicles and a massive new tropical map called Tanoa. What makes the Arma series so special is the dedicated team of modders that add new forces, new equipment and new feature sets to the game on a daily basis. The game now features Steam Workshop integration,...

Today, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero got a major update: the addition of a just-announced Hard Core Mode, a new difficulty setting intended to make the platformer even more challenging. The mode rebalances the difficulty of Shantae’s entire campaign by increasing enemy health, damage and projectile speeds. It also deploys new patterns of enemies in existing stages and even drops late-game enemies in stages they previously never inhabited. The game’s 1.01 update, out today for all platforms, adds the new mode free of charge for all owners of the game, in addition to a few bug fixes and PlayStation TV support for the PlayStation Vita version. Above, watch eight minutes of Hard Core Mode in action, including rebalanced sections of the game’s first two stages, plus the first two boss battles. S...