|
As in C&C: Generals and other recent RTS games, experience earned on the battlefield is cashed in for unique on-demand special abilities or unit bonuses. Both sides have three tech-trees to choose from. These break down into specialties for armor, infantry, and depending on which side you’re playing as either Allied Airborne or Axis Propaganda abilities.
Depending on what tech-tree your opponent chooses you’ll fight a markedly different battle. For example the Axis Propaganda tech-tree grants you the ability to spend command points on a demoralizing propaganda blitz that sends Allied troops running for the hills. Mixed in with an offensive move a player can quickly change the direction of a battle with any one of the higher-level abilities. Personally, I’ve never found anything that Allied Howitzer cannons couldn’t fix.
This may have something to do with the battlefields of Company of Heroes being completely destructible. Buildings blow apart wall by wall, fire burns things in a delightfully pyrotechnic fashion, and everything crumbles under tank treads. At times it may feel like you’re watching the History Channel. That’s how impressive the graphics are at higher settings, but don’t be surprised if you can get the game running even on a “lower end” system. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll run reasonably well.
At times it may feel like you’re watching the History Channel.
|
In fact the “Essence” engine really impressed me out of the gate. I never once crashed out to the desktop, and the only noticeable slowdown came during particularly large artillery barrages. Also, while the built in auto-updater works like a charm I never found any issues that needed patching. Stability isn’t something I expect from a PC game before a few patches. I tip my hat to the QA department. It’s just a shame they couldn’t get map and mod tools done in time to ship on the disc. It’s just not a real-time strategy game without my patent-pending “god awful user created maps.”
For all the polish and fun I’ve found in CoH there are still a few head-scratching gaffs to be found. For example you can’t play Allied vs Allied or Axis vs Axis matches in multiplayer. While I’ve heard the official explanation (realism), I just know that someone will hack/mod it into the game at first opportunity… which just makes its absence (even as a non-standard setting) all the more odd.
The load times are nothing unusual for the latest cutting-edge PC games we’re playing these days, but real-time strategy fans will find them longer than they’re used to. Blame the drool-worthy high-end graphics or the destructible landscapes. Either way, you should be prepared to wait up to 45 seconds before getting to blow things up.
Multiplayer is a polished experience with matchmaking, ranked games, chat rooms, game searching, easy and clean setup options, and a team of Relic paid designers dedicated to maintaining a fun game balance… but there’s not a huge number of maps out of the box. Lets hope those map-making tools and/or more official maps come soon.
It’s not technically fair to say that Relic Studios have taken real-time strategy games to new, uncharted heights (CoH borrows a lot of gameplay from DoW), but when compared to the RTS games of other studios, Company of Heroes is an amazing achievement that moves the RTS bar another notch higher. It’s also on my short list of candidates for “Best Game of 2006.” The job of every person working on a real-time strategy game just got that much harder. Thank you, Relic Studios.
|
