I can safely say without hyperbole that this is the most beautiful, dynamic, thrilling and emotive real time strategy game I have ever played.
Ok, I can see that I’ve not built this up enough for you. I know your sort; you’re worldly wise and therefore very cynical about World War 2 settings for games, let alone in the RTS genre. You’ve played tens if not hundreds of average-at-best strategy games and can tell a Tiger Mk2 from a Panzer at six hundred yards. Well, Company of Heroes makes it incredibly hard to stand back and think of it as just another WWII game. You feel like you’ve been to boot camp with every one of your troops, you can see the whites of Jerry’s eyes, you can almost smell the gasoline from your armoured cars and you get shellshock from every mortar shell that lands near by. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Company of Heroes gives you command of the American invasion of France on and after D-Day, June the 6th 1944. You storm Omaha, drop paratroopers into St Lo, capture Cherbourg and destroy a V2 facility in a daring night raid. This is all just for starters. Every mission you undertake is varied not just from an objective point of view but also from the way you undertake them. In single player you are assigned a commander ability, either Airborne, Infantry or Armour, depending on which you get you’ll have a range of support types available to you once your squads have earned enough experience. Every one has something special and you’ll be able to choose which you prefer when you play online.
I really can’t overstate how beautiful this game is, beautiful and kinetic. Everything has been so carefully upgraded from the Dawn Of War engine from which the game has sprung. Walls, as you’d expect, provide your squads with heavy cover, but tank shells quickly demolish walls to rubble, so this now only provides partial cover. Mortars can batter that down to no cover at all and artillery can create craters that provide cover once more. Nothing is fixed, houses will fall down when a Sherman tank smashes through its gable end; the squad that was inside will be crushed. Hedges provide camouflage for enemy mortar teams, but a Sherman Crocodile with a bulldozer will soon steamroll through with its flamethrower blazing leaving nothing but a burning wake! Sound, physics and graphics combine to make this the most cinematic gaming experience the RTS genre has ever seen; a sentiment that is echoed by the cut scenes. Both in game cinematics and the artistic videos that precede them are well written, sometimes moving, sometimes troubling, and always brilliant.
Company of Heroes is not for the faint of heart, for those like me whose goals in strategy gaming always involve keeping casualties to a minimum, you may find yourself overwhelmed. Many of the missions will involve heavy losses even at the easiest difficulty setting. Mortars pinning your troops while others accidentally advance into heavy machinegun fire, tanks suddenly set upon by panzershrek wielding Nazis and snipers caught out in the open by artillery. War is hell, and it’s occasionally made worse by some glaring AI failures. The most hilarious of which was the mortar team who happily set up under the porch of a building where my riflemen had just set up a forward barracks. I watch as the mortar team open fire on (what I can only assume was) the veranda that insulted their mothers, and brought the whole structure down on top of them, much to the annoyance of the riflemen. Your tanks also seem disturbingly determined to reverse into combat wherever possible leaving their weak rears exposed… If I didn’t know better I’d swear they were mooning the enemy. This leads to my one main criticism of the game, the fact that it doesn’t give you any time to enjoy it whilst you’re actually playing. You are constantly watching over your troops, safe in the knowledge that any tanks will refuse to return fire if they can’t see the AT gun that is attacking them. Troops will happily crawl slowly toward the dug in enemy sniper and then shoot rifles at the outside of his building until you tell them to throw a grenade or they all die. And that a single mortar team will devastate a squad of infantry who thought they had done enough to escape by hiding behind a tuft of grass.
With this said it is a strategy game, you are required to have the dexterity of a cat, the speed of a gazelle and the multitasking ability of your Mum in order to excel at it. While you may not have time to think about how much fun you are having mid game, rest assured, you are having fun. When you finish a mission or skirmish and you wipe the sweat from your brow you’ll look back and realise that you’ve never played anything like that before. You’ve never been so engrossed, so committed to your objectives and so concerned for your boys. If you buy this game you won’t regret it for a second, seriously, you won’t have time to.
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