YouGamers.com

Reviews

Company of Heroes

Breaking new ground in tactics

The control system soon becomes second nature, and you find yourself deftly moving your troops from cover to cover under heavy fire. Some units, such as machine gun crews, anti-tank guns and bunkers have an arc of fire that is limited by the direction in which they are facing. This gives unit placement a distinctly tactical flavor, unlike any previous RTS game: exactly where you point your anti-tank guns and bunkers can mean the difference between a successful defense and total defeat. To the point of frustration, actually: your loyal gun crews refuse to turn and face an enemy shooting them in the back, preferring to take unanswered shots and die rather than disobey your order. Unit placement has one more caveat, as you have to take ground elevation into consideration. While many features of the terrain, such as likely cover or accessibility, are easy to spot on the screen from the standard camera angle, elevation differences can be hard to see. Placing a machine gun emplacement behind a crest of a hill can make it virtually useless against an enemy attacking from the other side (well, useless for anything but shooting the ground and kicking up clouds of dirt), so checking for elevation by tilting the camera every now and then is advised. Physics simulation-wise elevation is handled very well, as units gain a range advantage when shooting from a higher position.

If you are playing on a low-end system, you can forget about moving the camera level to the ground and retaining any sort of control or responsiveness. Draw distance is very short from the default camera angle, meaning that the video card only has to render a small percentage of the game area. Checking the lay of the land from a hilltop, with graphics detail turned to max, will choke even the fastest graphics card on the market today. Relic recommends using the default camera angle, and the publisher's system requirements and recommendations obviously reflect this. With a more powerful system, adjusting the camera angle feels more like a game and less like a slide show of holiday photos from Normandy.

Axis and Allies: game balance

Breaking from the ubiquitous trio of sides to choose from, Company of Heroes only has two playable armies: the Axis (represented by the Nazi Germany's forces) and the Allies (the United States Army). In multiplayer games, the two sides are different in both infrastructure and units, but as of patch version 1.5 they seem very well balanced. Early on in the game, the most obvious difference is the number of men in an engineer squad, the first available unit. Here the advantage goes to the Allies, but later on Axis fighting infantry is tougher and more upgradeable. To counter that, the Allies have a great anti-infantry weapon, a half-track vehicle equipped with a Quad .50 cal. machine gun. The Quad cannot, however, even scratch the StuG IV assault gun, which the Axis usually field sooner than the Allies have tanks available to them; and so forth. With different tactics or deployment strategy, the above sequence might not happen at all. Still, the game's unit design philosophy seems to follow a rock-paper-scissors approach, which effectively forces the player to field all unit types (infantry, weapon crew and armor) at some stage of every game. This provides variety, simulates real combined arms tactics and encourages learning to use all available units.

Another new feature that brings variety to the game is the Command Tree selection. Players are rewarded for enemy kills with command points, which allow advancement on one of three Command Trees. This essentially gives the player bonus abilities, such as special infantry units and vehicles, artillery strikes, aerial strafing and bombing runs and even a demoralizing propaganda attack. None of the commander abilities are overpowered, and despite six different abilities on each Tree, there is little overlap between them. Command Trees available to the Allies are Infantry Company, Airborne Company and Armor Company, while the Axis have three types of Doctrine: Defensive, Blitzkrieg and Terror.

Finally, a major difference between the sides is their method of gaining experience and veterancy. Allied units can earn experience by destroying enemies; the Axis can build a specific building for improving their units' experience level. As a result the Axis have more control over the quality of their units, while the Allied player will get the benefits of veteran troops randomly but free of charge, and grow more attached to specific units. Resource hunting and careful spending is vitally important in the multiplayer game, and often dictates the outcome of the battle. Resources are gained by capturing and holding strategic points on the map, which helps the game towards a more realistic representation of military strategy than the typical resource harvesting RTS.

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6

Related Stuff

Tags