GameSpot's E3 2005 Editors' Choice Awards

Best Action Adventure Game
Best Adventure Game
Best Driving Game
Best Fighting Game
Best Massively Multiplayer Game
Best Platformer
Best Puzzle/Rhythm Game
Best Role-Playing Game
Best Shooter
Best Sports Game
Best Strategy Game

Company of Heroes (PC)

Developer: Relic
Publisher: THQ
Release Date: 2006

The strategy genre is always one of the most competitive in the gaming industry. The number of great strategy games vying for attention at this year's E3 certainly spoke volumes to that effect. So for the GameSpot editors to almost unequivocally nominate a World War II real-time strategy game as the most impressive strategy game shown at E3 certainly says a lot, particularly for a setting that's rapidly becoming trite.

So what's so special about Company of Heroes? The first thing that strikes us about the game is the extremely impressive artificial intelligence in its soldiers. One of the complaints that's often levied on RTS games is that they're babysitting simulators for units that know how to walk around and shoot, but don't do know how to do much else. In Company of Heroes, the soldiers will move and act much like you'd expect real soldiers to move. Command them to move up the street, and when they reach their destination, they'll intelligently find cover behind debris and behind corners. They'll peek around their cover to shoot, and hide back behind it when under fire. And they'll do all this autonomously, in a contextually intelligent manner. The average soldier in Company of Heroes will be modeled with hundreds of different animations, promising extremely lifelike motion.

Gameplay Movie

This video offers a glimpse of what to expect from Company of Heroes.

Watch It »

The environments in Company of Heroes are also fully destructible, so you can blow up, or blow a hole in, any building on the map. Heavy artillery will also pockmark the landscape, creating craters in which your troops can find cover. Tanks can push barbed wire and other infantry obstacles out of the way, clearing the way for soldiers to move forward. What's amazing is that even if a building is partially destroyed, your troops will be able to garrison it and find intelligent cover inside the rubble, using it for shooting through a window or crouching behind one of the partially destroyed walls. Did a tank just get blown up in the street? The AI is smart enough so that your troops will use that burning chassis as cover while they cross the road. The combination of such adaptable AI and a destructible environment make for a battlefield that is truly ever changing and more alive than anything we've seen before in an RTS game.

The game engine allows for incredible smoke and lighting effects like these in real time.

Of course, Company of Heroes isn't slated for release until sometime next year, in 2006, so we're hoping that the final quality of the game reflects the quality of the demonstrations we saw at E3. If Relic does succeed in what it's trying to do with Company of Heroes, it might just be the game that jolts the RTS genre out of stagnation.

Finalists