Company of Heroes

Sep 12, 2006

It's hardly surprising that Company of Heroes is from the developers of the visceral and imaginative Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. They've taken tired old World War II tropes and breathed thrilling new life into them with what is arguably one of the finest RTSs to date.

But be forewarned that Company of Heroes is a handful. This isn't one of those RTSs about getting more wood than the other guy. But it is micromanagement intensive in the sense that you have to use your troops according to sound tactics, pinpoint timing, and careful balance against whatever forces the enemy army is using.

You usually control units in squads, and the AI does a remarkable job of handling the finer details of cover and firing. For instance, if you move a squad across a graveyard and they come under fire, your men will take cover behind headstones and walls, returning fire unless they're pinned. Nearby mortars will automatically target revealed enemies. No matter which way they're facing, tanks will rotate their turrets to fire at the best target. You still have to manage tactics, but the little details are in the very capable hands of the AI. This isn't one of those games where your guys stand around waiting for your orders while someone shoots at them.

But neither is this one of those games you'll win by simply building a lot of units, drag selecting them, and sending them in one general direction. This is a game about guiding your men with all the care and attention of a lieutenant in the field, and sometimes even a sergeant. At times, when it comes to firing an anti-tank weapon or positioning the arc of fire of a machine gun, you're down at a corporal's level. This is often a matter of making tough choices about resources (an anti-tank shot will cost resources you might want to save up for something else) or anticipating how the game will progress (you might want to align the machine gun down a particular street to cover your flank). So the micromanagement is always integral to the action rather than being annoying busywork.

This level of involvement is actually a lot of the appeal of Company of Heroes. In many RTSs, you're hovering above everything. But just as they did with Dawn of War, Relic uses awesome graphics, a flexible camera, roaring sound, and convincing voice work to pull you down onto the field. There's an immersive 'you are there' sense to the action that you won't get in most RTSs. The basic feel of playing Company of Heroes isn't unlike playing Call of Duty.

There are only two sides in the game, and they each have the same basic unit types. This might sound limiting in comparison to other RTSs. But when you consider that each side has three unique "doctrines", there's a considerable amount of variety. As you fight, you earn command points, which you can spend in one of three doctrines. Each has a simple tech tree of special powers that tweak the game rules, add new units, and give you powerful abilities.

For instance, the Allies can choose among Infantry, Airborne, or Armor doctrines, each with six unique powers that you can purchase once you've earned enough command points. At first glance, these might seem minor, offering perhaps a special unit or an off-map attack of some sort. But after closer examination and maybe a few games, you'll see that each tech tree almost breaks the game.

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.