Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
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ESRB:
Blood and Gore,Strong Language,Violence
Publisher: Relic Entertainment Genre(s): Strategy Home Page: http://www.companyofheroesgame.com/
Stand-alone expansionCompany of Heroes: Opposing Fronts follows the modular approach Relic took with Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War's expansions. The pack is essentially a stand-alone game, although at a slightly reduced retail price of $40 / £30. You can play all the new content and multiplayer games using the new factions. The original D-Day campaign is unlockable with a valid Company of Heroes CD-key, which also unlocks the original U.S. and Wehrmacht factions. All the content is installed in one go off the Opposing Fronts DVD, and you can tell: the installation takes a good half hour or longer, especially as the game's auto-updater won't let you play before you download and install every patch (two separate patches at the time of writing). The two single-player campaigns again use Command Path selections to create different scenarios for the player. The British forces' artillery command path is introduced in a mission where your forces defend against a fierce Panzer Elite counter-attack, while the Royal Engineers are employed to clear the ruins of Caen of German booby traps. In a nod to RTS traditions, Opposing Forces features a "special forces" mission where you play the British Commandos and have to make do without a base - similarly to the U.S. Airborne missions in the original Company of Heroes D-Day campaign. The campaigns also do a great job introducing the British Command Paths and Panzer Elite Tactics, which are crucial for multiplayer.
Although multiplayer is the long-term attraction of Company of Heroes, Opposing Fronts offers quite a lot in the single-player department as well. Compared to the six missions in CoH's D-Day campaign, there's a lot of meat in the nine British and eight Panzer Elite missions. Just like the original campaign, the missions are split up to parts, with situation reports shown on the tactical map in between. This allows for better pacing of the mission, and completing objectives often launches a cutscene that advances the story. Even though the setting doesn't afford much flair in the writing, the storyline is well-written and often engaging. In the German campaign's first mission, the Panzer Elite troops are on a training exercise near the town of Wolfheze, when the British - in the largest airborne attack in history - drop right on top of them. The German officers watching in awe at the "summer snow" of parachutes is one of the most powerful moments in the single player campaign. In the middle of a desperate defense, your troops find the plans for Operation Market Garden in a destroyed British Commando glider. In a cutscene following the mission, your commanding officer Major General Voss outlines the plan to foil the British operation. The events are told both in cutscenes and during gameplay - pivotal plot developments happen during missions, lending weight and urgency to the gameplay experience. Acting and Scripting: Good, Bad & UglyThe cutscenes feature lots of dialogue and movie-style direction. Even though the way the characters respond to the horrors of war is clichéd and seen in a hundred WWII movies, the way the cutscenes are combined to the game's realistic, brutal depiction of fighting makes Opposing Fronts a forceful experience. The writers seem to have run out of inspiration for the British campaign, however, as the characters are less developed - expect plucky Brits and Scots with rather stiff upper lips, with the occasional Canadian thrown in for comedy value. In a way, maybe the writers found it easier to relate to the Germans, who are faced with insurmountable odds and an uncertain future.
There is one thing, however, that keeps the German campaign from becoming a hallmark of single player campaign excellence: terrible voice acting. Actually, inconsistent might be the better word. Voss's voice actor, who reads many of the situation reports, does a great job, but outside of him the game features some of the worst German accents ever recorded on digital media. I was able to tune them out most of the time, but some of the lines were just teeth-grindingly bad. The British campaign doesn't suffer from this, as you only hear the occasional shout from German troops, not lengthy monologues.  Stop shouting at me with your horrible fake German accent! I'm trying to kill this Sherman Calliope If the game's voice acting is inconsistent, so is the single player campaign scripting. There are some particularly nice touches, such as British Commandos surrendering en masse when they realize they're going to lose and have nowhere to go (you can also give them a little nudge with your charging Tiger tank). Another great show of attention to detail is when you change command paths in the middle of a campaign mission: if you have units that don't fit your new command path, they don't just disappear or blow up (a la Command & Conquer). Instead, you're told that the units - let's say, self-propelled artillery pieces - are needed elsewhere, and they drive off-map. Unfortunately, Relic's play testing let through some annoying and potentially crippling bugs in the single player campaign scripting. One mission ending message can get stuck in a loop, and unexpected events can leave you in a situation where the only alternative is to load a saved game. For example, if your engineers place demolitions on a bridge but die before you have time to blow them up, there's no way to blow the bridge - even if you bring up new engineers, they won't place new charges. The game's patches have so far concentrated on multiplayer, but hopefully a future patch will fix these problems.
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