![]() ![]() The other big problem is that there felt like there were encounters that were unwinnable on first turn. It was a solution but one that detracted from the grandeur of watching Company of Heroes unfold. This is good but did turn some fights into stop motion events, where I was pausing every few seconds to micromanage my units. Thankfully there is a faithful Left Stick button that instantly paused the fight and allowed for me to issue commands at my own pace. That said, when things started to get hectic (which happened a lot), there were moments where I found myself floundering. Real attention has been placed on having good, context-sensitive commands too. The flourish to each unit’s movement sold me on this game.Ī lot of work has been put into making sure that the myriad commands map to a combination of controller presses. ![]() This left the Gurkhas to throw a volley of grenades at a unit attempting to hide in the church and demolish the side of it. The Sniper started taking shots at the enemies and drawing their attention, which allowed for my riflemen to get close enough to flush the bazooka crew out of their foxhole and straight into the firing line of the half track. I was able to put the Sniper in a belltower, then move the riflemen up the main road. Equipped with two squads of riflemen, a group of Gurkhas, a sniper, and a half track with a mounted machinegun. For example, in one event I was required to take a square in the middle of a small village. The scenarios are built to feed into this imagination. This was what I saw in my head as I played in the sand as a child. To add to that the way buildings can be demolished by canons and artillery sparked my imagination. These details breathe life into every fight, it gave me this feeling of commanding real humans. On foot units will dive to the ground when under enemy fire, sidle up to a wall and peek over, or go through a ‘let’s see what happens’ motion as they throw a grenade. The way a heavy machinegun unit unpacks their gun and then sets up looks great, but it doesn’t stop there. This is aided by the animations of each of the units. The combat itself gives a real sense of scale. The encounters change in style, from holding a point in the face of encroaching forces, taking of specific points, traditional RTS objectives where it is just about obliterating enemy units. This offers a solid structure to the combat, and gave me the impression of being part of a bigger army, and that my actions were only a subset of wider interests in play. ![]() To further complicate things each unit can gain experience and improve, so it is possible to make them better at different scenarios and make it more painful to lose them. These requests vary from taking a specific strategic point, or detouring around a mountain to help partisan forces. On top of these considerations different military factions of the allied forces will make requests and depending on what the player choses will align themselves and offer bonuses to the player. As the player moves the units, missions will appear where the player has to balance the requirements of their main objectives with the potential rewards for the side-distractions. This plays a lot like the Total War series, with units moving around a board. Once that is done, Company of Heroes then introduces the player to the open world map. The game even introduces a teaser mission where enemies don’t move much that allowed me to apply what I had learned. I felt like I was flanking enemies, throwing grenades, and destroying cover but also learning some of the more complicated actions without being overburdened. This sets up the basic objectives: how to move units, use their skills, how to heal, to upgrade, to retreat, and how to changes lines of fire and order tanks around.įor someone that rarely plays RTS this is paced really well. There is a comprehensive tutorial that lays out the controller mapping. In single player there is a choice of two campaigns – Italy and North Africa – or skirmish mode. I will say that the game offers various combinations of versus, and co-op play against the competent AI. My dabbling in the versus multiplayer saw me outclassed by better players and it would be hard for me to write about balance among the different factions and units. Now, to clarify, this review is based off Single Player content only. That is until I played Relic’s new Real-time-Strategy Company of Heroes 3. Over the years I’ve played a few war games and they seldom came close to the vivid conflicts on that sand mound. In my head these games were vast campaigns fought across multiple battlefields filled with explosions, destruction, panicked retreats, and rallying maneuvers. I would often play with them on a huge mound of sand my dad used to mix for cement (pretty sure tens of army men ended up in the house foundations). When I was a kid, I had a huge hamper full of plastic army men. ![]()
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