Company of Heroes is an RTS game that uses the same engine as Warhammer: Dawn of War II - another THQ title. Set in the second world war, the single-player campaign takes us from the Battle of Normandy to the the liberation of Europe.

Playing as the American or Axis forces, you get a large variety of forces at your disposal. Usually you construct a small HQ along with defences, and then capture command points that give you resources so you can get more units and steamroll the Nazis. In addition to this you have offscreen support that you can call in - this includes artillery, spotter planes and parachute units.

You can also choose a combat paradigm which entitles you to special units and abilities like the V2 rocket or commandos. This gives you more options to play with.

Many of the units have lots of different special abilities, like digging trenches or laying mines, and these open up a variety of tactical options as you can react to the map and the enemy.

This is realised graphically on well rendered maps and units. These can be navigated around easily, and the architecture and feeling of the period has been well presented. There's lots of entertaining pyrotechnics - although you'll need a reasonably good system to run COH at full whack - my laptops Radeon X1300 couldn't cope with all of the effects and slowed down so much to be unplayable.

There's sufficiently meaty booms, bangs and crashes. Usually your squads will yell if they're under attacked, but the script isn't terribly varied and it soon gets tiresome. I also found it hard to care about the people in the cutscenes - the characters appear to be lifted wholesale from Saving Private Ryan.

Multiplayer is great fun, there are survival scenarios and co-op or versus modes. The enemy AI is ruthless and you have to concentrate very hard in order to survive battles.