On the surface, Company of Heroes may appear to be just another World War game, but Relic has done a magnificent job at combining one of the most dried out themes with the most captivating gameplay dynamics ever employed in a game of this nature. Company of Heroes retains many of the gameplay dynamics from Relic’s other success story Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, as well as infusing several other options that brings out the best for a World War-themed game. With a reliance on fast movement and strategic tactics, Company of Heroes does an excellent job at keeping gamers occupied and constantly on their toes as they must continually gain ground and flank enemy targets.
Company of Heroes plays in a similar way to Dawn of War, in the sense where you’ll have to capture strategic points to gather resources. However, the difference with Company of Heroes is that each map is split up into various territories, all of which provide different resources and governs your ability to call in support for your infantry. So, the game quickly forces you to explore the map, moving from one area to the other to gain a stranglehold over the enemy by cutting off their supplies as well as their ability to call-in reinforcements to the frontlines. You see, if the enemy secures a territory between a resource point and your base then your supplies from that territory will be cut off. It’s important to fortify locations with additional buildings and manpower to prevent the enemy from taking your supplies. These supplies are often broken up into three different resources – fuel, ammunition or manpower – all of which provide different benefits whilst fighting. All of the resources are used to build structures and units, with some of the resources only being devoted to certain items. For example, fuel is used primary for vehicles and airdrops, while ammunition is used to purchase new special abilities such as grenades, sticky bombs, and even flamethrowers for your units.
Another feature added in the game, to ensure even more intensity, is the ability to use experience points in a command tree fashion. The more units you kill and employ onto the battlefield will increase your experience points, rewarding you with additional abilities to unleash. There are three different command paths you can choose from that reinforce your army differently. The Airborne path allows you to call in paratroopers and aircraft bombardments, while others provide additional moral support that boost your infantry’s firepower or cost reductions on tanks. The command tree offers a great deal of variety in battles, and proves to be a key factor in multiplayer games as your team members can mix and match with different paths.
"God damn Krauts have us pinned down from both sides."
It’s simply amazing with the amount of units that are at your disposal too. You can control simple infantry units, call in paratroopers, engineers, snipers, heavy artillery units, jeeps, tanks equipped with flamethrowers, light tanks, heavy tanks, the list goes on. To add to this great diversity of units is the ability to purchase additional features for each of these too, much like Dawn of War. To make the most of your units you can purchase upgrades such as equipping them with better weapons or grenades. In addition, engineers can also place garrisons, sandbags, bared wire, landmines and anti-tank mines to prevent the enemy from entering certain areas. It’s these sort of authentic and fascinating inclusions that makes Company of Heroes that much better than anything else on the market. The ability to fortify yourself in an area, zone-off bridges with mines and bared wire is a great addition and adds a completely new layer of strategy to games.
Company of Heroes consists of three modes - campaign, skirmish and multiplayer. While skirmish and multiplayer play in virtually the same way as one another, the campaign mode offers a completely different view of the game. The campaign mode, which consists of 15 missions, allows gamers to play out the dangerous events that Able Company and Fox Company had meet, including the devastating landing on Omaha Beach, the first drop on D-Day as well as the capturing of St. Fromand and St. Lo. The exciting aspect of the campaign mode is that the game doesn’t just offer your typical eliminate your target objectives, which is featured in most real-time strategy games. Taking a leaf from games such as Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty, there are various missions that will need to be fulfilled in order to succeed. There are all sorts of missions, ranging from escorting supplies down a German guarded road, destroying anti-air guns across a large German infested field, or holding onto a key location until reinforcements arrive. There’s a great deal of diversity offered in each mission, assuring gamers with an increased amount of intensity and difficultly the further they get in. In addition, each mission also includes a number of side objectives to fulfill. Completing side objectives provides medals to signify your ability, and acts as a nice incentive for gamers to fulfill these objectives. The campaign mode sometimes strays a little from the game’s core gameplay (securing resource points and having a HQ to build additional units etc), but it does a good job of changing the pace of the game reasonably often. There will be times where you’ll have to face dangerous missions with only a handful of units, while at other times you’ll have the luxury to build more.
The Skirmish and multiplayer modes are virtually identical in design, and this is where the game’s core gameplay comes into play – where you’ll be fighting against human or computer controlled opponents for strategic and resource points. You begin each match with a HQ and from there you must spread your units out to capture points and build additional buildings that supply you with more units and upgrades. There are two different modes that are playable - one that is a deathmatch where you must eliminate all of your enemy targets, while the other is a tug-of-war of securing victory points. In this mode it’s a race to secure and hold victory points, as well as holding onto resource nodes that are also scattered throughout each map. Each team will begin the match with a set amount of victory points, which slowly decreases if you have no victory point nodes under your control. The first person to zero loses, or if you're incapable of producing anymore troops. This therefore moves the focus of the battle onto these points, as you and your enemy continually try to hold these positions with whatever means possible. These battles can get quite frantic with the action switching focus between resource points to victory points contantly, relying on you to survey your surroundings – you can never be too sure where a sniper might be hiding, or when or where the enemy will drop an air bombardment.
"Jerry will never know what hit him".
The multiplayer mode is a real big step forward over Relic’s previous online modes. There’s matchmaking, a news centre that informs you about new updates, a ranking system and you can even earn military badges that signifies your brilliance on the battlefield. The only real drawback to the multiplayer is that there’s a bit of a lag when playing some games. From the handful of games we played there always seemed to be someone who would constantly lag, which really bogged the matches down. It's hard to say whether this is a problem on Relic's behalf or that we just lucked out by being matched with people who had terrible connections, constantly.
The bread and butter of the game is found within the game's absolutely outstanding AI and detail incorporated into the game. The enemy AI is incredibly ferocious in understanding how to exploit your weaknesses as well as using certain aspects of the ever-changing battlefield to their advantage – using buildings as safe zones for example. They’ll continually reinforce areas that you’re attacking, and fortify their key locations to prevent attacks. The only real downside to the AI is that vehicles have iffy pathfinding skills. There were often times where tanks would get stuck on one another, lacking the ability of indicating who would move down a path first. The detail, however, is absolutely superb without any flaws. You can literally zoom right in on every character, watching their movement and incredible reaction to buildings blowing up and gun shots flying. They’ll duck and jump for cover as frequently as possible, and it’s great to see the animation of some characters as they indicate for others to move ahead. The detail of buildings exploding, the units, the locations and the entire atmosphere of war is so beautifully recreated it’s just amazing how captivating this game can become. The audio adds to the atmosphere also. Soldiers will mutter things like “Where is our damn support?”, “What? No one’s got a damn grenade?”, as well as girlish screams and cries as they come under fire. The tension of the music really picks up too depending on the situation you're faced with.
Company of Heroes is simply a remarkable game that hasn’t been witnessed for years. The amount of detail and care that was put into this game shows, resulting in one of the most fascinating experiences for any platform. Despite suffering from a few minor drawbacks, Company of Heroes is incredible in each and every aspect. Featuring an addictive and fulfilling campaign mode, intense and enjoyable skirmish and multiplayer modes, and some beautiful detail that brings the entire game alive, Company of Heroes is the complete package that you don’t want to miss out on.
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