Company of Heroes

Ladies and gents, the RTS genre has a new benchmark

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Company of Heroes is at first inspection quite a traditional, over-head view real-time strategy game, without any particular novelty in control, goal or unit generation. The campaign follows a US Army Company from the bloody shores of Normandy to the cracking open of Fortress Europe, and so certainly doesn't push any envelopes or break any moulds when it comes to story or character driven plots. What Company of Heroes does do, however, is set the gold standard for RTS gameplay and is likely to continue to do so for some time.

Company of Heroes does not sound like a winner in concept. A great deal of the actual nuts and bolts of the game is directly transported from the excellent Warhammer: Dawn of War. Many of the basic concepts such as each infantry unit being comprised of a squad, strategic location derived resources, and the take-and-hold tactics required for victory will be immediately familiar to anyone who played through Dawn of War, to the point I was able to completely skip the tutorial stages. Now seeing as how DoW was itself very good, this wasn't a bad sign, but probably meant that the game was going to be little more than a fancy modification with a cosmetic overhaul. This, I am very pleased to say, is defiantly not the case - THQ and Relic have indeed borrowed much of the mechanics of their previous titles, but have expanded the scope and tactical involvement to far surpass its progenitor and arguably every other RTS available to date.

Earlier RTS titles tended towards being quite antiseptic when it came to action, despite their essential theme being of armed forces bent on each others murder. Command and Conquer, for instance, had the occasional brief explosion, troops would lie down a second before disappearing, and maybe a building would crumble a little. Most times a player would be easily able to identify the forgone conclusion of a skirmish long before shooting started, just by looking at the collections of units going into the fray to the point where you could practically see the dry maths of the games engine behind the tiny tanks.

Later developments tried to deal with this in various ways, such as the rock-paper-scissors approach, which usually led to drawbacks of tanks being inexplicably unable to kill infantry, platoons of infantry curiously annihilated by a lone guard dog, etc. Until now no other title has had the mechanics, the attention to detail, and the fine balancing to make it the actual players' tactical decisions that will make the difference on the field and carry the day.

Company of Heroes manages to incorporate into its gameplay both the subtitles of tactical play and the earthshaking devastation of modern warfare. Involving and brilliantly executed, its unusually lengthy missions requiring a sometimes exhausting level of constant consideration and planning that I cannot remember previously giving to an RTS. It used to be a case of close ranks, throw up a tall wall, collect and research until you could build the Imperial Bitchslapper Tank Mk. II and then roll over the bones of the bad guys all the way to tea and medals. With the action coming thick and fast in CoH, sitting on ones collective behind will get you shot in it, so the player will find themselves improvising with the units they have, using every inch of cover and terrain, and really not just trying to muscle through any given situation. Every unit has a chance of killing every other - the player is just going to have to be very sneaky about it if the scales are not tipped his way. Tactical manoeuvres such as flanking, fire traps, pinning down pesky units, etc, are not only possible here, but actually integral to winning. Throwing troops at a situation after spending a quiet first half playing the capitalist will not work - just ask half the poor buggers buried in The Somme. Company of Heroes is a war game (the morals of enjoying which are on shaky grounds indeed, but that's a bleeding heart moan for another day) which means that there are no ineffectual basic troops, and the weapons at your command are absolutely murderous in what they can and will do to an exposed enemy target. The very first level set on the Normandy beaches will quickly disabuse the player of ideas of just storming the defences with enough man power, as clumsy open approaches will result in your troops being reduced to piles of bloody red ruin.

Company of Heroes is crunchy, in the way its predecessor showed us RTS could be. Weapons fire is frighteningly fast and devastating; cannons will fillet buildings and blow the unlucky inhabitants out the back windows like rag dolls, explosions flatten and deform terrain and anyone unlucky to be standing on it, and machine-guns fill streets and fields with genuinely intimidating roaring fire. This tactility and visceral response makes the plight of the little guys being sent into harms way much more real to the player than awkward hero or promotion systems such as attempted by Joint Task Force. Whereas Warhammer used the ability of making RTS truly thunderous into an over-the-top romp of cartoonish carnage, Company of Heroes uses it to make each unit precious and the battlefield quite a scary place indeed.