And now for something completely different... (Company of Heroes)

What I'm going to talk about today is the game I've had more fun playing online than any other game I've played online, including the great Everquest 1. And it's called Company of Heroes, which you've probably heard of. It's a critically-aclaimed WW2 RTS by the fellers that brought us Dawn of War, and it is quite simply brilliant. It recieved unanimously good reviews from the major sites on release, so I went and picked it up and played through the single player campaign. It was pretty good, if somewhat easy (even on the hard settings) for an experienced gamer thanks to the inability of the AI to deal with armour, or to think outside the box when it comes to displacing you from defensive positions.

Online, though, it's brilliant. It's been diminished slightly due to the expansion pack adding two new armies (one for the Allies and one for the Axis), therefore meaning that each one has to be balanced against two potential opponents rather than just one, but its still excellent. The game has beautiful graphics even on a fairly average PC, and the destructable terrain is fantastic. You start off with a pristine battle map, and it quickly gets reduced to rubble when the tanks and artillery hit the field. And, speaking of artillery, this is the first game I've played where the awesome power of artillery is properly represented - not only is it visually spectacular, but it's an extremely important game mechanic that can kill pretty much any unit in the game if correctly utilised (and not properly countered).

The unit balance feels good too. Basic troops come in squads that can be reinforced and usually upgraded, and the early game is all about using them to outflank your opponent in conjuction with support weapons like machine-guns and mortars. There is a LOT of skill in this game, more so than in any other RTS I've played online. To make things even more interesting, the light vehicles in the game are pretty much invulnerable to all but the special abilities of the basic troops, so if a vehicle hits the field before the enemy has a hard counter to it, it's often got a game-turning effect. So you've got to balance early-game dominance against preparations for an armoured attack on your troops. And once the heavy armour hits the field, the light armour becomes largely obselete in a straight-up firefight.

But one of the great features of Company of Heroes is that it's definitely not a tankrush game. It's a game of combined arms - a couple of unsupported heavy tanks by themselves will be shredded in the late game. You have to think carefully, because it's a game very much about tactics. Tanks are weak from the side and rear armour and are generally fairly poor anti-infantry weapons, support weapons only have a limited angle of fire, troops can be supressed by special abilities or machinegun fire, grenades are superb against bunched troops - there's a lot of tactical decisions to make, and it's an extremely fluid game where the balance of power moves backwards and forwards extremely quickly. It's damn exciting stuff, particularly against the good players.

The fact that the online scenarios are 'take and hold' rather than annihilation makes it far better, too. It doesn't matter if you've shelled your enemy's base into oblivion if the victory points have been in their hands for too long, you still lose. It also means that there's rarely any times in the game where nothing is happening, there's usually a skirmish happening somewhere along the lines as one of the players tries to stop his VP counter ticking down - there's no massing troops in your base here. If you do that, you'll lose. Given the power of the game's artillery, you'd have to say the game certainly favours the attacker, which means it's relatively easier for a player who is losing to regain the initiative than in many other RTS games, and again this makes the game extremely exciting.

Needless to say, it's also not a game where you have to go harvesting resources. Basically, the amount of resources you get are linked to the amount of territory points on the map that you control, and how you spend your fuel and munition resources is a vital part of your strategy. It gives a huge element of strategy to the game, and needless to say you'll have to change your tactics on the fly to deal with what your opponent is throwing at you.

Overall, it's a truly superb online game. The game is extremely skillful, rewarding the player who can use his squads skillfully while manueving his vulnerable support weapons into positions where they can do the most damage to their opponent while simulatenously protecting them from harm. The game feels balanced, and the way you start with infantry skirmishes and end with heavy armour like Tiger tanks rolling across the battlefield is a brilliant progression that is generally timed to perfection, with the really powerful units only hitting the battlefield when the Victory counters are down to within a hair's breadth of zero. I've played countless brilliant games where I've managed to hold off a Tiger with a handful of half-dead infantry squads to snatch a victory, or had a certain victory snatched away from me by a masterstroke by my opponent (usually helped by the appearence of some particularly lethal unit I wasn't prepared for at just the wrong moment).

It certainly won't cost you much to pick up CoH nowadays, and it comes with the highest reccommendation from me. It also dovetails neatly into the subject for my next post, which was originally going to be part of this article, but I've since made it into an article of its own - where the MMO genre could be going next. MMORTS anyone? MMOFPS? I really don't think MMORPGs have a monopoly on the future of the genre, mostly due to the inherent lack of skill involved with them. Keep your eyes peeled for my next entry to see what I do think are possibilities.