World War 2 and Real Time Strategy: my current least favorite videogame setting and my current least favorite videogame genre. For me, both of them show just how stale videogames can get when ingenuity and creativity are passed up in favor of a quick buck/yen/euro.
Sure, Relic has a good track record of making RTS games interesting with Homeworld, the more recent Dawn of War, and the A-for-Effort Impossible Creatures. Even so, Company of Heroes = RTS + WWII, and that look very similar to the forumla for a boring cash grab. Fortunately, while clearly following up the model established by Dawn of War, Company of Heroes is a near-perfect example of how to take all the strengths in a game and improve them all; but before I talk about the good, let me get the bad out of the way.
Company of Heroes has one single player campaign that follows Able Company (filled with heroes, of course) from their D-Day landing to the subsequent offensivees in the French countryside. While players are spared the ideological dilemma of having to play as the Nazis in the single-player game, the story for the campaign that is there is a complete retread of every WWII movie/game from the past decade or so: soldiers follow brave leader, confront adversity, and despite the odds, overcome adversity with good ol' all-American know-how and many, many guns. It is generic, boring and uninteresting; fortunately it is also not needed in the least to enjoy the game because Relic went all out on the gameplay itself.
Instead of following the RTS design trend of including more units, more buildings, and more chrome, in the hopes that customers will buy based on volume, Company of Heroes seems to be designed with a minimalist approach. As such, the units, buildings, and chrome that are in the game are fantastic.
In most RTS games, epic battles seem to be the primary fixture and the only way to accommodate them is by having maps that are epic in size. This means that the hill in the middle of the map is actually a giant mountain. Of course, no giant mountains can be filled with thirty or so units, and the sense of scale just feels broken. However, a hill CAN be occupied by thirty units and that is the simple logic that makes Company of Heroes work so well: there are no epic struggles. This is a game that makes the small seem huge.
So while other RTS games might have a capital city take up only a small part of a map and be easily conquered by a few units, Company of Heroes makes the cities the entire maps. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to hold the city, you now fight tooth and nail to hold the bombed out house on the street corner near the bridge. The result is that one soldier feels like one soldier and, much to my delight, it feels that way without being detrimental to the control scheme.
Instead of controlling individual units, soldiers are grouped into squads. This means you don't need to worry about having to individually select thirty soldiers all over the map because you will have a manageable number of squads with some vehicle or heavy weapon support with which you can easily manage all your Nazi stomping. However, it is neither the well-designed maps nor excellent squad system that makes the game work so well, but how these two facets work together so seamlessly.
If an enemy squad is garrisoned in a building, you can toss some grenades in to wipe them out, snipe them one by one, win by attrition with standard rifles, or you can just roll up with some big guns and bring the whole thing down on them. The various options, with all their costs and benefits, add incredible depth to each encounter that allow for a wide variety of play styles, increased by the fact that the terrain is not only deformable, but also interactive.
Coupled with the cover system in Dawn of War—in which certain terrain elements give units defensive bonuses—strategic play now changes dynamically with the terrain. So most of a squad may have been wiped out by that tank blast, but the survivors now have a crater to protect them while they bring the tank down. Again, the strategic options are many. The icing on the cake is that all of these options look and sound fantastic.
The graphics in Company of Heroes don't come cheap, but if you have a rig that can handle them, you will be treated to particle effects and lighting effects, the RTS likes of which you have only dreamed. On top of that, the unit animations are all so well done that it just adds a layer of even more polish onto the entire package. When I saw my soldiers dig in to defend a bridge or retreat from battle—a user controlled option that saved more than a few of my squaddies—I felt all the more invested in the game. Apart from some pathfinding issues with tanks—which have resulted in some aggravating losses—friendly and enemy AI are both very good as well, giving the individual units a sense of character, which is further augmented by the audio.
As with everything else in Company of Heroes, the audio comes to life in the details. The gunfire and explosions are good, but the human elements are what make everything come together. Although admittedly lacking in scope, and sometimes a bit repetitive, the voice work perfectly captures the immediacy of the wide-variety of combat situations while always making certain it is about your units—hopefully—staying alive. Thankfully, staying alive in Company of Heroes does not come from the harvest, build, smash routine.
Like Dawn of War, Company of Heroes eschews traditional resource collection by having the three game resources—manpower, munitions, and fuel—automatically gained by players depending on how many control points they have. Of course, different resources are given by different control points in sectors spread across the map. So if players want to earn more munitions, they have to go out into the field, capture and defend a munitions point. Since controlling sectors between the front lines and the HQ results in being able to reinforce your front lines more easily with field bases, map control is now an enormous part of the game, particularly in multiplayer situations.
Although the multiplayer options aren't that different from Dawn of War, they do include objectives outside the standard "kill-'em-all" options. The most engaging option is the Dawn of War style map control battle that has been modified to be more akin to the Battlefield multiplayer. Each player starts with a certain number of points and controlling a certain number of critical locations results in your opponent losing points, and vice versa. Team play in these modes is very intense and can create some great strategic situations, thanks to the different special abilities each player can call upon.
Each side, the Axis (playable in multiplayer) and Allied forces, each have three different tracks of special abilities they can choose from. For the Allies, these equate to Infantry, Airborne, and Armor Companies, for the Axis, it is the Defensive, Blitzkrieg, and Terror Doctrines. The abilities are all very different and all confer very powerful bonuses that are activated by spending resources, effectively tying their use to how well you can control the map. The choice of abilities needs to be made early on and can't be changed midway, which means a well-coordinated team can definitely win a battle in which the odds are against them.
As you might have noticed, despite being both an RTS and a WWII game, I enjoyed Company of Heroes quite a bit. The somewhat short single-player campaign does have a few missions that aren't quite as good as the others, but the others are undeniably great, and certainly stand out among all the RTS games I have played. A fun multiplayer mode and an overall level of polish combine to make this not only a game for RTS fans, but also for any gamers looking for something that actually feels new and—most importantly—is actually fun.
