	Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
	Developer: Relic Publisher: THQ Release Date: Out Now Players: 1, online multiplayer	Words By:
The original Company of Heroes was one of the best WWII strategy games around, and that's saying something considering the amount of competition it has. Running from the same engine Relic used in their Warhammer RTS, Dawn of War, it offered large-scale battles with great unit customisation and balanced resource management and control point-capturing really well. Tales of Valor is Relic's second expansion for the series, this time working as a standalone game, but feels more like a diversion... As I mentioned in my review of Dawn of War II, with the game dynamics already so well attuned Relic really didn't need to tinker with anything - just give us gluttons more of the same to gobble up, perhaps with a few minor tweaks and a couple of extra units. So what's new, you ask? The answer is: not too much really, in fact it’s almost business as usual in the CoH war room; the graphics look a little more polished but aside from that it doesn't look too different and the levels are still split into several smaller missions, all with their Andy Gray-style briefings with lots of animated arrows all over the place. The only real addition is the direct fire mode which allows you to, well, direct the fire of your troops manually. Sometimes it can be useful to suppress a particular group of units but your troops are already pretty smart and the basic commands themselves do the job well enough already. To be honest most of the time when I switched to the DF mode it just made things more fiddly, so unless the AI's doing something silly you won't need it. Missions-wise the back of the box heralds: "new tactical campaigns for the Americans, the German Panzer Elite and the German Wehrmacht". Three campaigns is quite bulky for an expansion, but then again it should be noted that although it’s available for Ł14.99 from Play.com, this expansion’s RRP is Ł29.99 - the cost of a full game! The three 'campaigns' are all great fun and focus on controlling a small group of units through several missions, getting involved in the nitty gritty of attacking and defending the same points in singular battles. Although it was great to have more precise control by restricting the units and controlling only a few, the base-building elements that were so great in the original had been almost completely scaled back. You could only create a base for the last bit of the third campaign, and that was a relentless onslaught that left your base in tatters after the first ten minutes, hopelessly churning out riflemen to hold back the allied hordes. As fun as the campaigns were I couldn't help but feel cheated that they could all be completed in an afternoon - they are the shortest campaigns I have ever played in a PC strategy game. What sticks the knife in even more is that the focal point of the main menu is this long list of campaigns you can play, except they're all greyed-out. On the box it says you don't need the other CoH games to play, but they've put the campaigns of games you don't have on the menu just to tease you, to show you how rubbish your copy of the game really is. It's as if I'm being mocked by the game for choosing the Company of Heroes 'Lite' version: "Oh, you've only got the three campaigns, have you? How quaint..." Once you've finished the three campaigns, but what are essentially three extended missions you're encouraged to take the game online, where apparently most of the time has been spent improving the multiplayer. In addition to the standard deathmatch and king of the hill, three new modes have been added: Panzerkrieg is essentially a tank deathmatch, but you only get one and it's souped-up. Stonewall is a timed game where you defend a town against waves of attackers and Assault gives you a special unit with which to try and breach the enemy's fortified defences. I've never been a massive fan of playing RTS' online. They're ridiculously complicated and hard to get into, as every player has already worked out the most efficient sequence of building a hundred tanks in a minute and a half. Instead of in the offline games where you can try out all types of units and do a bit of sneaky strategy online games are all about spawning the most munitions for the least manpower and rushing the other guy's base in under 35 seconds. It's like comparing a sensual massage in a health spa and a quickie in an alleyway that smells of pee. Nonetheless, I braved the online mode and just setting up a Relic online account was a ordeal, as the box to create an account was constantly greyed out and it only decided to work after ten attempts. Once I got into the lobby I tried to look for anyone playing the new modes - only having one tank to control would mean I wouldn't suffer for not knowing the way to speed-build tanks. Unfortunately no-one seemed to want to play ANY of the new modes and lobbies were stuck to the original deathmatches. Every lobby had all the German slots already filled with players and no-one in the Allied slots, which I found out later was because the German Panther tanks are ridiculously overpowered and cheap to build and despite downloading two patches it still hasn't been corrected. 90% of my time online was spent going in and out of lobbies, joining only to be told a minute later that the lobby is now full. When I finally did get to play two of us were very quickly beaten by three blokes on the German side in a choppy, laggy Blitzkrieg. Even if I had some unnatural love for online RTS gaming there was nothing here that worked particularly well to entice me to play these few modes as opposed to the offline campaigns. The brutal truth is that Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor is a very small package indeed. Three brief campaigns that won't last past a day and three new multiplayer modes that no-one apparently fancies playing. With the funny stuff Relic is pulling at the main menu I'm surprised this was released on its own at all-it really belongs as part of a Gold Edition bundle of the original CoH, along with the other expansion. Any CoH fans buying this expecting a complete package will be bitterly disappointed, especially if they pay full price for it. Newcomers to the series would be better off buying the original and the real expansion, Opposing Fronts, which has much more in terms of content and will be slightly cheaper.