Company of Heroes is a WW2 RTS game developed by Relic. The game can be described as Dawn of War with a World War 2 setting. However COH is so much more than Dawn of War. The engine has been tweaked, the graphics vastly improved, and the game play is as compelling as it ever was. RTS games have suffered in the past few years with repetition. Essentially the basics of the RTS haven’t changed since the early Command & Conquer era. With the news that C&C 3 is in development, and with Company of Heroes, hopefully we will see resurgence in the genre.

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Game Play

If you have ever played Dawn of War then the game play is relatively the same with a few minor tweaks and additions. For those that have never played a RTS there is a comprehensive tutorial detailing how to play the game. From the moment you play the game it’s easy to see that the developers have spent a lot of time developing the single player game. The story and the levels are excellently done, even if the campaign is a little short. As in most war games, it’s the Germans vs. the Allies.

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The key to success in Company of Heroes is to capture key strategic points on the map and to build your army of units to wipe out the enemy. The strategic points are so important and control your flow of resources. Capturing the points is only half the battle as you need to defend them rigorously, if you don’t the enemy will quickly take over that point.

Your attacking strategy is much more important than in other games. You can’t just go in with a load of units and expect to win. Units such as tanks are very powerful, but it’s important to attack your enemies’ tanks from the rear. This is the tanks week spot. So it will take much longer to attach a tank from the front than to come in from behind and attack the units’ week spot. Ground units are also much more intelligent. They can hide behind trees to avoid being hit. On some occasions a couple of ground infantry couldn’t be wiped out by a tanks machine gun or canon.

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Much like in Dawn of War, units and buildings can be upgraded. While the game promises greatly in this area it still seems to be lacking a little depth. The path of upgrades and new things to build

With each skirmish your tasks remain pretty much the same. The strategy you take when capturing strategic points remains static. The multiplayer skirmishes should be excellent, but each time you play it’s easy to follow the same order of doing things. The resources of man power, munitions, and fuel trickle in so slowly even when you have most of the strategic points that you have to spend wisely. For example most tanks can be dispatched of with just a couple of units of troops upgraded to support sticky bombs. In fact lobbing a few sticky bombs can often be more effective than putting your own tanks up against theirs, especially when the German tanks are so much more powerful than yours. However each bomb costs ammo. It doesn’t take long before you’re out of ammo and your men are being squashed by the tanks.

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Although the game is detailed in everyway, there are a few quirks. The infantry and engineers for example, seem to move at the same speed as a Sherman tank. Sometimes enemy units out in the open seem to be immune to attack and can’t be killed until they move. The enemy tanks don’t often try and move to attack your tanks from the rear to cause most damage; they seem quite content with sitting in front of you while you attack them. Also when your playing the higher difficulty levels you can take over the majority of the strategic points, wipe out most of the computers buildings and units for them to come out of nowhere and completely annihilate you. Even from the brink of destruction the computer seems to have an advantage some how. It’s possible the speed they are getting resources in is quicker than yourself on the higher difficulty settings. This seems like cheating rather than improved AI. Umm sneaky.

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Graphics

The graphics in Company of Heroes are a visual feast. The game is so detailed that even after playing the game completely through you still notice something new you didn’t see before. Tanks can crash through walls, leaving dusts and bricks flying. Units can hide themselves in buildings and you see them man the windows with their weapons. The only downside is that the majority of the maps look and feel very similar with a bit of a copy and paste feel. It would have been good to see a bit more variety but that’s probably been left out until the inevitable expansion pack.

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Sound

As usual with RTS games the sound is pretty forgettable. It’s easy to get drawn into the game and completely forget about the background noise. Overall it’s hard to pick fault with the sound effect or the in game music.

Overall

While Company of Heroes is a very good RTS it doesn’t really offer anything different over Dawn of War that justifies the expense if you already own the later game. However the game is a must buy for any gamer who is looking for a challenging and engaging title. Essentially Company of Heroes does feel like Dawn of War with a new skin. This isn’t necessary a bad thing since Dawn of War was so good. Company of Heroes is receiving a lot of good press from reviewers and gamers a like and forums are littered with glowing reports about this game so why not give it a try for yourself?