Company of Heroes [PC]

Infantry, for instance, gives the Allies the Ranger units, which are effective against armor. It also lets infantry construct defenses, which are normally the domain of weak engineer units who have to be carefully guarded. The Rangers can cheaply counter the Axis armor advantage and the easy-to-build defenses create a situation where the Allies are better at holding territory.

Airborne gives the Allies paratroopers. Okay, no big deal. Until you realize that paratroopers can call in reinforcements from an air drop. In Company of Heroes, each of your infantry units is a squad of up to six men. As they take casualties, they're less effective until you return them to a barracks and have them wait around to reinforce to full strength. This limits how hard you can push an offensive. But paratroopers have no such limitation. Then there's the Armor option. The resource model in Company of Heroes is built around capturing territories, each of which increases your income in one of three resources: manpower (used to buy units), munitions (you spend this to upgrade individual units and to "buy" your special attacks, such as artillery and air strikes), and fuel (a crucial resource for building vehicles and for "researching" more advanced units). You can only capture territory with infantry, which means your vehicles are great for support, but useless without soldiers alongside to help them capture conquered territories.

But one of the early Armor abilities is Raid, which lets light vehicles capture territories. This shifts the way a game unfolds. Suddenly, the Allied player is in a unique position to run rings around the Axis by darting jeeps and half-tracks past the front lines to wreak havoc.

And each of these game twists is unique to the Allies; the Axis have their own set of game-breaking tricks. Furthermore, each side has unique mechanics for things like unit experience, technological upgrades, healing, and defenses. Relic has done a wonderful job of building exciting gameplay around these historical combatants, carefully navigating between the extremes of dry realism and whimsical gameplay.

In addition to detailed graphics and some really vivid pyrotechnics, the destructible terrain is an awesome sight to behold. Recent RTSs such as Rise of Legends and Age of Empires IIIhave done some great work with Havok physics and buildings that are dynamically blown apart. But in those games, it's eye candy. In Company of Heroes, destruction is a component of the game in a way that we haven't seen since X-Com let us root out sectoids by bringing down entire farmhouses.

Here, farmhouses are cover, but they can only stand up to so much damage before they're reduced to smoldering piles of rubble. Walls will crumble, hedgerows can be uprooted, and that gate keeping out your infantry won't be a factor once a tank has rolled through it. Between this destructibility and the way you can easily lay barbed wire, tank traps, minefields, and bunkers, Company of Heroes is a game in which any given map will rarely play the same way twice.

The single player campaign is, thankfully, much longer than that Relic offered in the original Dawn of War. Missions allow some degree of flexibility thanks to large maps. It even offers a bit of replay by giving you special goals that will earn you medals. The multiplayer game could have used a speed control to help players deal with the pacing, but this is otherwise an exciting new type of multiplayer RTS. It's particularly suited to team play on large maps.

It's been a good year for RTSs, and now it's a good year for World War II games as well. Company of Heroes is going to be a tough act to follow in both regards.