Short and Unimaginative, a Dent on the Franchise
I cannot say the same about CoH: Tales of Valor and I'm sorry to see the franchise going this low. First, the game is amazingly short: three campaigns with three missions each, and the fun is over more sooner than you think because this time developers focused more on action than on strategy, and the missions fly very fast. This take me to the second comment: All the missions got away with the basic concept of an RTS, where you needed to build and defend bases and armies and think strategically to achieve your goals on long games built on small tactical achievements to accomplish a greater goal. That why it's called RTS, RT Strategy. Tales of Valor is almost entirely focused on the tactical side of the game, on the battles fought and not on the strategic side. There is no much strategy whatsoever in the game, just fight, fight and fight like crazy trying to achieve a constantly changing final mission. In a way it reminded me of World in Conflict, which was labeled an RTS but at the end it was really an RTT, RT Tactics if such genre exists. Tactics are ok, but a game that relies 90% on tactics and 10% on strategy cannot be called an RTS, and that's exactly the case with ToV. My feeling is that they focused too much on the new Direct Fire concept that tries to give you the ability to make your troops fire where and at what you want with the click of your mouse. This may work for an FPS game but on an RTS with the grandeur of CoH it is not only very hard to use but misses the point of strategy in favor of tactics, maiming the game's strategic potential. Direct Fire is optional anyway, but the game seemed to be built on maximizing the chances of using this concept
The third point I can make against the game as that the missions are uninspiring and appear to be done with not much care. There are no new things from previous CoH games, and the constant focus on tactics makes the game somewhat repetitive and monotonous. Also, being the game as tactical as it is, it forces you to pause the game often in the middle of the battles and the game doesn't flow as well as previous games, it's interrupted more often than not and in some missions, particularly on the last campaign, you can barley enjoy the game itself without having to pause every 2 minutes or so
The last negative point is the game stability: It's dreadful. I have a PC with an Nvidia GTX 275 card, an Intel Quad and 4 MB of Ram on a 22" monitor. Considering the requirements of the game, this PC should cut through its graphics like butter, and you should be able to play it at the highest settings possible. In fact that's what I did, obtaining an average FPS rate of 55-60 on the in-game testing, with FPS never going below 20-30. The first two missions played OK, I think the game hanged once or twice, unacceptable but still much better than the suffering of the two last missions of the third campaign. What a nightmare! I got a constant visual C++ error about Windows or DirectX not able to handle not sure what, no matter my PC was way over the recommended settings. Sadly, I couldn't do anything to stop this error, there are no suggestions from Relic, no information on the web and no matter I played with the settings in several configurations the game kept crashing with this strange error I couldn't figure out
If you're a big fan of CoH, like me, go ahead and get the game as even the ability of playing one more CoH mission should be enough for you to pay 20 bucks, but take it with a grain of salt and lower your expectations because this is not a great game, and not sure if can be even called a good game. I hope Relic come out with a real sequel, taking us to the Japanese theater or to another of the several WWII fronts with the quality that made the original CoH the classic it became