In the Company of Heroes

By Vermouth

I feel like real-time strategy games have been in something of a rut for a while now. Sure, plenty of big names have came out and received great scores like Empire at War and Battle for Middle Earth 2, but they just haven’t been able to capture that old Black Magic. Well, very surprisingly to me, Relic’s Company of Heroes takes the genre out of it’s rut and really shows that there is plenty of life in real-time strategy games. Not only that, but this is an excellent game in just about every category and a really nice WWII game as well.

Let’s start with a quick disclaimer: I wrote a column a month ago complaining about this game’s demo, and how it had all sorts of elements that were conventional for the genre but really didn’t fit in a WWII game. And while those elements still don’t fit in to WWII, they’re almost trivial in this game. Once you get into the game you’ll understand that while resources and base building are still here, they occupy such a fractional proportion of your time that they’re barely worth mentioning.

Now on to the meat of the review. Unless you’re blind you can take one quick look at the screenshots out there and realize that Company of Heroes is a beautiful game. The units and environments in this game look drop dead gorgeous. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever been able to say this without adding the qualifier of “for an RTS”. If a FPS title came out that looked as good as this tomorrow I wouldn’t have anything bad to say about the graphics. A neat note about the graphics - this is the first RTS I can remember that gets the unit scale correct. Infantry to tanks, tanks to planes, mortars to machine guns. Everything is in the right proportion which really pleases a real WWII nerd like myself. Furthermore the little details really give the game some life. Like for instance if you pump out a bunch of Sherman tanks from a factory. They all look the same but once one obtains varying levels of veterancy they begin to look different. Just like in real life they put sandbags on the front of the Shermans once they’d been in the field a while. As good as the units look, the environments are even more gorgeous. They’re fully destructible and man do they get destroyed. I remember at the beginning of one mission I was in a complete French hamlet with about 15 buildings and after we’d done our dirty work there were less than four buildings left standing. The ground had been scorched, there were pock marks everywhere, it really looked like a photograph of post-war Europe. I actually felt glad that Relic hadn’t seen fit to include civilians in these towns we were fighting in, as surely they’d have been killed. I should add that this game doesn’t require a super beast of a PC to run it. I’ve got a GeForce 6800 (vanilla) on an AGP slot with an AthlonXP 2500+. Hardly the fastest machine in the whole world but the game ran smooth as butter at a high resolution.

The audio matches the video for quality. It starts off with a tremendous WWII type score. The kind of bombastic symphony music that you would expect to hear in this kind of game. While the music is certainly good, the sound effects and voicing is really the star of the show. When a battle is going on you really know battle is going on, and what kind of weapons are in the field as you can hear the crack of rifle fire, the roar of Machine guns the whoop-bang of mortars and the huge explosions of the big guns of tanks and field guns. Furthermore, squads scream all kinds of relevant information which makes it easier for the player to know what’s going on. For instance one call you’ll hear quite frequently in the campaign if your tanks are being attacked is something to the effect of “Sherman taking hits, Sherman taking hits”. Since you won’t have a enormous number of units at your disposal this allows you to locate things pretty quickly based just on the sound.

But Company of Heroes is no mere show pony, it does a lot more than look good and sound good. It’s one of the most fun RTS games in years thanks mainly to how well they made the combat system and how focused battles are on the combat. Yes you’ll have a base, and yes you’ll have to recruit units like in other RTS’s, but that really won’t occupy that much of your time. The vast majority of the time you’ll be spending managing battles. Fortunately this is the best part of Company of Heroes - the balance they achieved between armor and infantry. Normally in RTS games I’ve played armor either really dominates or they develop an inane rock-paper-scissors system that completely defies any tactical reasoning. This game managed to make tanks very powerful; a squad without anti-tank weapons will have real trouble dealing with one and even with a Panzerschreck the odds are highly in the tanks favor. But there are lots of things that infantry can do that tanks can’t do like capture strategic points, take out anti-tank guns and capture them - that sort of thing. It creates a real need for application of combined arms where infantry, light armor and tanks all have their own roles to play and are all a big part of an effective battle. Furthermore you have an additional level of stuff from your company commander that you gain throughout the course of the battle for extra powers like off-map artillery, and paratroopers that can really turn the tide of battle in your favor. Personally I was a huge fan of the paratrooper tree but all the trees had their strengths and weaknesses.

This game doesn’t have a whole lot of story. It pretty much extends all the way through the fighting in Northern France and ends in late August right before what is known as the Normandy breakout. The upside of that is that you won’t have to see the Battle of the Bulge which in WWII strategy has of course been terribly overdone. You’ll see fighting for Carentan, Cherbourg and St. Lo along with smaller hamlets and hilltops in the north of France instead. The game offers a bunch of replayability in that it has 4 difficulty modes and each mission has several optional objectives that provide that extra something to go after. The campaign itself is fairly long, featuring between 15-20 missions give or take a few; and should take you a good while to complete. If I had to attach a number I’d guess around 20 hours but I’m not really sure. The AI in this game can be pretty difficult, I played through the game on easy the first time as I’m not the best at these games but even then it was still a challenge. The bit I’ve played of the game on normal difficulty was very challenging. I’d imagine even if you were a ninja you’d find the top levels of this game a challenge to your amazing skills. Furthermore the game also has an excellent multiplayer mode which is definitely different than most RTS games’ multiplayer. Instead of trying to trash your opponent’s base your objective is to go after victory points and capture those which can lead to more fighting away from the respective bases and more towards the middle of the map. The game ships with several good multiplayer maps. I didn’t play much online because I’m not so exceptional at these kind of games and don’t need my feelings hurt that badly.

I kind of came to this game with low expectations, I had tried the demo which really did a disservice to the game. This turned out to be an excellent game that anyone who likes RTS games or WWII games in general should give a try. It’s got some really great moments and some of the best combat I’ve seen in an RTS. Throw in it’s excellent technical production values and you’ve got a game that really is a winner.