Company of Heroes - a good game that was nearly great. (Company of Heroes (PC))

Name: oodlenoodle9

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Product:	Company of Heroes (PC)
Date:	30/09/07 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fantastic graphics, realism, speech and the ability to blow everything up.

Disadvantages: Irritating chase after elusive enemies, dodgy tank AI

Company of Heroes (CoH) is a World War 2 Real Time Strategy (RTS) game from THQ and Relic, the makers of the brilliant and multi-award-winning Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series. The game puts you in charge of three companies of the US Army, fighting from D-Day up until the German forces are driven from France. You can also play as the Germans in skirmish mode or online.


GAMEPLAY

Basic gameplay is much the same as many other RTS offerings – you select your men, move them about, use your engineers to build things whilst collecting resources and then have an almighty scrap before one side emerges supreme and wins. But this is pretty much where the similarity ends.

In your typical RTS your men are fairly basic looking, and when ordered to move or attack do so with one simple animation, only responding to the environment inasmuch as they don’t (usually) walk through buildings, and responding to the enemy by stopping their action and statically shooting or stabbing them, perhaps with the occasional yell or cry of “Yes sir!” Not so with CoH – your men advance in formation, using cover where possible and covering each other as they advance with the squad leader giving commands. When they come under fire, they dive to the floor, crawl to cover and then fight back. Bullets don’t automatically hit, but look so realistic and dangerous that you really worry about where the next volley is coming from.

Another important feature is the resource system – your men don’t gather/mine them, they capture strategic points which allow an inflow of fuel, ammunition and manpower. This allows a front to form, and skirmishes to start over particularly important parts of the map. If a point is cut off from the front, you lose the supplies.

As with traditional RTS games, different units cost different amounts and have different abilities. Realistically, you can’t just add more men to a squad fighting on the front line – but you can establish a forward barracks or send up a halftrack to do so. You find yourself getting into the spirit of things – after you have secured a number of points you create a forward base, defend it with machine gun nests and wheel some artillery into place to pummel the enemy into the floor. You build a medic station to evacuate your injured men. Your soldiers build walls of sandbags and occupy buildings whilst rumbling tanks block narrow French alleyways. A sniper crawls forward to scout the enemy advance. Let them break you now!

It’s all great fun as long as you’re careful and the enemy plays ball. But that rarely happens – they isolate your units and gun them down with machine gun fire, they fire rockets into the rear armour of your expensive tanks. They swarm all around your lines, nicking any point you turn your back on for a second.

It can all get pretty irritating actually, especially when you are an inexperienced commander. If you know what you’re doing, you can create choke points and get the enemy more or less where you want them. At first though, winning on “easy” is a mammoth task.

The AI can be a problem too, with tanks getting in each other’s way, and then shooting each other when they open fire. Tell them to advance to the front line and they could easily crush your carefully prepared walls of sandbags under their hulking tracks. Babysitting them gets to be a bit of a chore, but they are so effective when micro-managed that it has to be done.

On the other hand it is not a major problem – and the little touches make all the difference. Buildings are destroyed realistically. When your men are talking to you and you are looking elsewhere they switch to radios. When you give them orders they don’t just give a sycophantic “yes sir,” and do it, they mutter: “Join the army they said. It’ll be fun they said,” or “We’re airborne, we’re meant to be surrounded!”


STORY

The story of course is nothing massively special – go to Europe, enact the famous battles of WW2 and quite a few on the side and there you have it. Variety is added by the fact that you’re sometimes in command of Fox Company (Airborne), sometimes Able Company (Infantry) and sometimes Dog Company (Armoured).

It has its moments of brilliance – D-Day just as dramatic as it should be, as well as a desperate last stand on a hill, a night fight with Fox Company scattered across the map by the wind and so on. But the missions quickly become repetitive – go here, blow that up, take that point, shoot him etc.


GRAPHICS

CoH uses the “Essence Engine” – coded from scratch by Relic to allow for dynamic lighting and shadows and advanced shader effects. It is fully 3D (of course) allowing you to pan, zoom and rotate around the action and to admire the impressively intricate details on men, machines and scenery. Explosions look violently realistic, tanks kick up dust, and fragments of exploding buildings rain dramatically around. The game looks just as good whether it is night, dawn, day or dusk that you are fighting in – and doesn’t require a supercomputer to run it. My low-to-mid spec PC manages fairly decent graphics settings, but better computers and graphics cards really do add to the effects. Relic claims that there are 2000 animations for a basic infantryman alone.

CoH also uses the Havok 3 physics engine to allow almost everything to be blown apart realistically. Artillery fire can be used to create craters for infantry to hide in – roll up a tank and they can hide behind that too. If the tank is destroyed its husk can still block a road until you blast it apart with a satchel charge.


THE ONLINE GAME

There are two online gaming modes: annihilation and victory point control. Annihilation more or less speaks for itself – obliterate anything and everything that isn’t wearing the same uniform as you to win. Victory point control works more like Battlefield 2 – when you have more victory points under your control (similar to strategic points – but even more strategic) the enemies point score begins to decline. First to zero loses.

If you can fight your way through the million and one patches that need to be installed to run the online game, then it provides a nice change from the frustration of fighting the computer by giving you the frustration of fighting ridiculously brilliant generals who are only too pleased to squash the nearest noobie with a big tank. It is fun for a while though.


IN CONCLUSION

All in all, CoH is a very well made game with beautiful graphics and countless great touches. It feels very realistic and in general the AI is good. The longevity of the game is not fantastic however as it quickly becomes repetitive and tiring to play because of the constant chase after the enemy.

If you are a fan of RTS it is definitely worth a try for interest's sake if nothing else. If you are not then it might be a bit of a shocking introduction to the genre - but a much better shock than most games will give you.

Summary: About as good as WW2 RTS gets - but still not quite perfect.