When we heard about Relic’s Company of Heroes we thought “Oh, another WW2 game…yawn.” Boy did we judge too soon! If Company of Heroes isn’t the coolest game we’ve ever played it’s darn close. If you are even remotely interested in the RTS genre buy Company of Heroes. It’s that good.

Graphics

Simply outstanding. The ability to move the camera at will and zoom right up to your soldier’s blinking eyes makes for some outstanding battle shots. Never before has an RTS been so cinematic. You can almost read the writing on each soldier’s gear! The effects, buildings, terrain and atmosphere are near flawless. For example, one of the tanks you can command as the allied side is an open topped model, manned by two soldiers. One soldier hands the other a shell, the soldier loads it into the barrel, and then they duck and plug their ears while the tank fires! Every one of your men becomes important to you. You watch your poor soldiers toss and turn as they die and vow to crush the enemy from existence.
The subtle fog over the battle field, cast shadows and dynamic lighting is amazing. We’ve never seen WW2 Europe captured so perfectly. Bravo, Relic, bravo!

Sound

“Conrad! Tie your ****ing laces!” Shouts one of your riflemen as they move out. The grunts, curses and comments of your men as you deploy them is incredibly realistic. While on screen their voices are clear, offscreen soldiers are crackly, as if reporting by old-time radio. Tanks, anti-tank weapons, grenades and other fun explosives shake the room. You can hear the sounds of artillery, even when distant, and the whistle of mortars will have you hiding under your desk.

Gameplay

Dawn of War was one of our favorite games. Company of Heroes pushes the Dawn of War engine to new heights. You command small companies of several men. Engineers build buildings, throw up defenses like MG nests and sandbags, and can use a flamethrower to burn enemies out of bunkers and fortified structures. Riflemen, paratroopers and other infantry can garrison buildings, take over abandoned weapons such as machine guns and capture points.
The economy works very much like Dawn of War with a few twists. Buildings produce different technology and troop types. You gain resources by capturing and holding points. Different strategic points provide different resources such as manpower, munitions and fuel. Technologies and units require different resources to build and sustain. If you capture an area but it is not connected to your headquarters by other captured areas you do not reap the benefits of the resources that area provides. You must take and secure the area, soldier!
The terrain is not just a flat place where your armies fight. Everything can be destroyed! Snipers fire from hedges and windows. Tanks knock down buildings, walls and pretty much anything else that gets in their way. Infantry huddle behind haystacks, tractors, ditches and fire from building windows. A good general knows how to use the terrain to force the enemy into deadly traps and choke points.
Do you like tanks, infantry or air support? You can choose a specialty during each battle. You earn points for engaging the enemy that you can spend on special abilities within your focus area. Infantry specialists get bonuses for their soldiers, forming fast and flexible response teams. Armor specialists have powerful tanks at their disposal to steamroll through defenses. Air specialists can call in bombs, strafing runs and drop paratroopers among other things. Different maps may change your style of play.
Your troops can only reinforce their numbers at your headquarters. If they get suppressed or penned down by enemy fire you may have to hit the retreat button to send them scurrying back to base to patch themselves back up. You can use special abilities like grenades and sticky bombs if you research them at the barracks and have the munitions to supply your troops (hold those strategic points). Nothing is more hair-raising then charging your poor riflemen company towards a tank with the hopes that a sticky bomb can take it out before it levels your defenses. Speaking of which, that tank has a weakness. The direction it’s facing is important. If you can hit it in the back, where armor is light, you can take it out much more quickly!
When you kill enemy companies your units eventually become battle-hardened veterans and do more damage. They also can pick up weapons that the enemy or your own company have dropped. You might be able to snipe that machine gun company and turn their own gun on them. It takes some time to move and set up emplaced weapons so you can hit a machine company from the flank and be out of the range of fire.
The gameplay in Company of Heroes is so deep and rich that you will be immediately sucked in. The only lament that we had is the lack of an axis campaign. When you combine the brilliant gameplay with the detailed graphics and sound you won’t be leaving WW2 until the last round is fired.

Longevity

We can’t imagine ever getting bored with this game. The destroyable terrain and dynamic strategic point system make every battle play out differently. You will have to continually think on your feet and hone your strategy to stay ahead.

Technical

Company of Heroes is a beautiful game. It ran at the highest settings on our main test system. It ran fine on the lowest settings on our older system. The AI is intelligent and tough. They will have you scrambling to keep up. Your men are also intelligent and will do their best to take cover and put up a fight. We didn’t encounter any glitches in the game. But then, what do you expect from Relic?

Our test system was an Asus motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 chip, an nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics card and one gig of dual channel ram. We also tried the game on a much lower end system using a 256mb AGP card and a 64-bit AMD processor. It ran great a lower resolutions and settings.