Company of Heroes Review

9.3

Format PC

Developer Relic

Publisher THQ

Genre Sim / Strategy

15 Comments

DESPITE BEING THE best RTS out this year - and certainly one of the best ever to grace these hallowed pages - Company Of Heroes isn't really a revolutionary game. What Relic have done is take the real-time strategy genre, cut it open, examine it, pull out all the smelly old bits that people hate and put in some lovely tasty new bits that people will like. Then they have sewn it up, put it on its feet and sent it out into the world to, er, bring happiness, light and cheer wherever it sets foot. It's like some kind of lean, mean RTS Frankenstein. Or some kind of lean, mean RTS Frankenstein's monster, for the pedants out there.

What I'm trying to say is that it's more an evolution of the genre. With Company Of Heroes, Relic have moved the RTS one significant step closer to perfection.

I'M LOSING WOOD
For example, resource management is a part of the game, but tedious gold, wood or Tiberium-farming is not - instead you accrue points by capturing and holding sections of territory, in a system similar to that used by Relic's last effort, Dawn Of War. You also build up special XP points by killing enemies. Yes, it's still resource-gathering, and you still use the points to create new units and unlock new abilities, but it's been cleverly engineered to force you into combat rather than encourage you to hang back, 'turtle up' and spend five hours constructing an elaborate, impregnable and largely pointless stronghold.

And then there's the tactics. There's nothing particularly inspired here; you have to make use of cover or your troops will be ripped to ribbons, and if you hold the enemy with one unit and then flank him with another, you'll probably wipe him out with ease. Tanks blow up quicker if you get round the back, where their armour isn't as thick. It's basic stuff, true - but it's rare to see it properly implemented in a mainstream RTS. We're talking about a genre where most combat is still determined by an abstract scissors-paper-stone mechanic, and the fact that Company Of Heroes uses realworld tactics that actually work made me feel like some kind of non-moustachioed General Montgomery.

It helps that, in the words of one developer, "shit blows up real good" in this game. My PC's subwoofer hasn't rumbled
out explosions so buttock-quakingly booming since Soldiers: Heroes Of World War II arrived a couple of years ago.

The way enemy troops somersault through the air after receiving the delicate attentions of a Calliope rocket launcher is a thing of terrible, Havok-induced beauty - we might even go so far as to say that it's "teh aw35om3 dood," if our parlance contained such terms (but it doesn't lol). It's an eye-popping display of destruction, but there's also a real purpose to it. This is one of a handful of games with fully destructible terrain. The battlefield can be completely reshaped by tanks, mortars and aerial bombardments.

STAY LOW
Your GIs can huddle in the craters that result from an artillery strike, or a tank can power straight through a wall to provide them with an alternative path to the next objective. And it's not just about knocking things down: you can also use engineers to build defensive structures like sandbags, barbed wire, tank traps and machine-gun nests, or order a unit to take up positions in a building (and you can see them actually do it - they'll kick open the shutters and mount a machine gun in a window frame).

Keeping your men in cover is vital if you want to succeed here, and thankfully Relic have made doing so a no-brainer: hover the pointer over a part of the battlefield and dots will appear to indicate where your men will end up, should you decide to click. Green dots are the best type of cover (ie behind sandbags or solid walls), yellow is minor cover (hedgerows and craters), no dots means virtually no protection and red (the middle of road, for example) means your men are more exposed than Arnold Schwarzenegger at the beginning of a Terminator movie. It works well.

COVER ME BAD
Such bunkering down is necessary at times - if you don't, the nature of the single-player missions and the abilities of the AI will hand you a severe asswhupping. Just as the real World War II wasn't all about building up a huge force and simply crushing the enemy, so you'll spend much of your time here defending as well as attacking. The German troops retreat back to their lines when they know they've lost a skirmish - "They don't like it up 'em, Mr Mainwaring," etc - but they always seem to come back in more numbers, as well as pop up elsewhere on the map to try and recapture territory.

It means that you often find yourself fighting on several fronts at once, but never in a frustrating way.

An RTS wouldn't be an RTS without some kind of tech-tree, of course, and aside from the usual 'You must build x to have y' arrangement, Company Of Heroes has a real humdinger - a beautiful sycamore of a tech-tree with leaves made out of bullets and that. It's called Company Commander, and it utilises the XP points you amass by slaughtering foes and capturing territory. Gather enough XP for a full Command Point and you can spend it on special powers, like the ability to drop in paratroopers anywhere on the map, or call in heavy artillery fire on an enemy position. Once you've selected one of these abilities, it can generally be used over and over again - but each time it'll cost you some of your regular munitions or manpower points too, to prevent you from going crazy and spamming the Hun with shock and awe tactics.

It's balancing touches like this that ensure the game remains a challenge too. There's a population cap, determined by the number of sectors you hold, so you can't build up an overwhelming force of 80 tanks before venturing out and taking on the Germans. It all comes back to this: you need to use tactics and cover.

When all the things I've mentioned come together you're left with something truly challenging and, more importantly, fun. Take the level where you find yourself defending the town of Carentan, which you've just captured, from a German counter-attack.

It begins with you entrenching a lot of troops and, if you play anything like me, with a ragtag handful of men squatting in a corner of the now shattered city. This is the one remaining territory you control, and it's hanging-on-by-your-fingernails stuff as you attempt to hold off hordes of tanks and jackbooted stormtroopers. The German artillery pounds the buildings around you into dust while you await the reinforcements that can save you. You run from cover to cover, using improvised
satchel charges and your own off-map artillery to stem the iron tide as your men drop one by one - and then suddenly, you realise the clock has reached zero and your buddies are on their way. Shermans roll into the town and from then on, it's payback time. Now the adrenalin really kicks in; this is every bit as thrilling as the most memorable parts of Call Of Duty or Medal Of Honor - and how often can you say that about an RTS game?

ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM
Another thing that needs to be mentioned before I reach the end of the review is the presentation. This is the first real-time
strategy game where you can zoom right into the action if you want; there's an incredible amount of detail. You probably won't want to play the game from down there - in fact attempting to do so would make you insanely masochistic - but you'll certainly want to pause it every now and again and move the camera down there. Just because you can.

The sound is also ace. We've already mentioned the booty-shaking explosions (is that the neighbours banging on the wall again?), but the rest is similarly riveting: rifle cracks, the scream of incoming rockets, the metallic trundle of tank tracks and some of the foulest language we've heard in a game all serve to add a welcome measure of atmosphere to the proceedings.

Like we said at the beginning of the review, this is an evolutionary step in the RTS genre, and one that, at least as far as this reviewer is concerned, is firmly in the right direction. Relic have focused on putting real-life tactics into real-time strategy, and not only that, they've made one of the finestlooking games of the year. And it's got tanks that shoot out flames. There have been lots of World War II RTS games, but this is the one that finally gives the subject matter its due - it's nothing short of brilliant.

PC Zone Staff