Padchuckr

Company Of Heroes

Or how I learned to love the RTS again, if only from playing the beta.

Basing a review on a Beta is a tricky business, there’s plenty of room to fuck a game up before its release, but I’m confident that CoH will survive the last few steps in development. Even EA probably couldn’t fuck Company of Heroes up this late in the game. Well maybe.
So what’s Company of Heroes all about then? Simply put it’s Dawn Of War given a complete overhaul and plonked into Second World War France. The overhaul is mainly in the graphics and in the handling of individual units, the interface and such is practically unchanged from the Warhammer 40k based classic. Dawn of War, for those who don’t know, had a couple of distinctive traits and these have been updated and plonked straight into Company of Heroes. First off is the squad system, tanks are still operated singly, but grunts and heavy weapon teams act in groups and may be supplemented with upgrades and reinforcements in the field. The second element to come over from Dawn of War, is the idea of capturing of strategic locations to gather resources rather than the mind numbingly boring process of spice farming (or whatever the hell people call it nowadays).

It should be stressed here that Company of Heroes is better than Dawn of War, even in Beta. Much, much better. Why? First and foremost the world is better. Dawn of War was great in many regards, but one of the core elements of Warhammer games are the heroes and the super units. Without some joker with a giant hammer or a demon the size of a building leading the charge it’s just not Warhammer and to folks who prefer their RTS games to be tactical, rather than a micromanaged melee of button mashing, this was a bit poor. Company of Heroes is much more about infantry killing infantry. A big plus. Second the graphics, maps and AI are vastly improved.

These improvements are best looked at as one thing, because it’s not so much individual tweaks to each of these factors that has occurred: it’s a total revamp in how troops act in the world. Not only does Company of Heroes look awesome, as static eye candy, but the way the units interact with the world is fantastic to see. The world is destructable, so tanks can plow through walls, flamethrowers can gut buildings and machinegun fire can chew up light cover. Troops also make use of the world in a much better way than in Dawn of War, with cover consisting of units actually hiding behind things and hitting the deck rather than just standing in a crater. This means that direction plays an important part, as cover can be flanked and turrets and heavy machinegun teams have to be deployed to cover specific arcs.
What Company of Heroes also brings to the RTS genre is some much needed intelligence. Over extend in the early phases of the game and you risk having your line of supply cut, as only strategic points linked to your HQ can provide income. Sit back too deep and you risk being overwhelmed by superior enemy numbers. Tanks and armoured vehicles, the nearest things in the game to super units, can be devastating in a frontal assault, but hit them in the back and they are easy prey. The morale system from Dawn of War also makes a welcome return, so a canny defender can still repel a numerically superior enemy if that enemy doesn’t have a cunning plan to avoid the defensive fire. There’s no shouting for the Emporer and stomping across open ground under fire in Company of Heroes, if you run a squad out in front of a machinegun nest don’t expect them back alive.
The one drawback that is apparent is that there are only two sides and naturally it’s the same US Army versus Axis Germany that we’ve all seen so many times before we can all probably name the weapons and tanks by sight and sound alone. World War 2 was a cliche forty years ago (OMFG did you just say that? - Rogz), now it’s a dead horse that’s been flogged into bonemeal. Still that said it might not be new material but it’s certainly the best take on that material. The engine also has a huge amount of promise so perhaps we’ll see some alternatives cooked up by modders in the not too distant future.
While in theory it is still possible for the developers to mess the game up completely before it hits the shelves in late September but given THX and Relic’s pedigree that seems unlikely and that Company Of Heroes will be the RTS of choice this Autumn, at least until Supreme Commander and Medieval 2: Total War arrive on the scene.