Excellent sound, outstanding grpahics, however only 2 different sides detract what could have a been a bench mark game.
User Rating: 9.3 | Company of Heroes PC
From the get-go Company of Heroes might not have your attention. Wait until your at grips your opponent and you might find enjoying and hating war at the same time. Rejoice and watch your 105mm howitser shells pound enemies to dust and cringe as you see your men get burnt and vapourised by V1 smart bombs, all in supreme detail thanks to its superior graphics engine. The sections that really stood at in this RTS were the sound, gameplay, and graphics and were accoringly graded. The gameplay might play partially the same as a standard RTS but the ability to turn a quiet French pastor into a raging battlefield packed with barbed wire, sandbags for cover, mines and bunkers all affectionately made by you or your arch enemy make this game an offering too good to miss. On that note it is extremely possible to be either offensive or defensive with either the German or American forces. Developing from this are the commander abilties, there are 3 per faction and provide the player the ability to choose to specialise in a different area of each of the military forces. These give the player the ability to provide additional customisation options to their already diverse armed forces. However the beauty of it is that you dont have to choose immediately, you could choose to wait until your opponent commits themselves to a commander choice and you pick one as an appropriate counter. Once to choose your commander there is no going back so choose with care. The gameplay has many nuanced elements including strategic points that come in 3 varieties (fuel, manpower, munitions). Each of these resources are needed for various abilities, upgrades, and unit recruitment. Another element that enhances the realism is most definately the idea of cover and COMPLETELY DESTRUCTABLE TERRAIN. Never before has it been done but this game has answered this point very, very well. Tanks are made appropraitely dangerous in that sandbag wall provides really no cover agianst a brutal Tiger Ace tank or the ingenious Sherman 'Crocodile' the flamethrower varient of the main-battle tank. All of these units add its own flavour and point of interest to the game making it all the better.
The campaign is unlike your standard RTS campaign in that it gives missions and objectives most logical to the given situation, eg. a road needs to be controlled, so take these locations, defend here for X minutes until reinforcements arive. Of course this can be turned on its head where you are the one giving the reinforcing or are the one taking and holding enemy ground or doing deepstrike missions to destroy experimental german technology. Either way it is contributing towards the war in some important yet minor way. Alas the deficiencies of the game must be brought to light....
There are only 2 armies (factions). Despite the number of units per team you only get 2. This also compounds with you only ever being able to fight against an enemy who fights for the opposing team. IE only Americans can fight Germans, not civil wars here lol. Another pet complaint is that the tank AI is still in the making and is hardly perfect. There you have it. Every point that is great and bad about Company of Heroes. All that is needed is the stand-alone expansion which will, apparently, double the amount of content and should send the COH into a sky-ward spiral of success. My advice? If you enjoy WW2 games or are a fan of RTS gaming heavy on combat with that extra realism then COH is the game for you.
