Company of Heroes by Fives

The first in a one-game series of reviews for this site, stripping Company of Heroes down into five of the best and worst facets of its character. Inspired by this year’s release of the Eastern Front mod, which finally brought the Red Army into the game (Ура!)  and by our forthcoming mini-league. Enjoy!

Five of the Best

Even the heaviest of armour needs its flanks covered

Realism

Easily one of its greatest attractions is Company of Heroes’ attention to detail and sensible level of realism. Units are bought as squads, which move cohesively across the battlefield paying attention to cover and reacting to enemy (and friendly) fire. If your men find themselves under mortar or heavy machine-gun fire, they’ll hit the deck and try to scramble out of harm’s way.

As a World War II game, there’s not much if anything in Company of Heroes that hasn’t already been seen before, but the developers did a great job of tying it all together. A well-laid ambush, using tank traps, mines and anti-tank weaponry can make short work of even the heaviest tanks in the game, whilst flamethrowers can be used to devastating effect against infantry in bunkers, buildings and trenches.

Resources

One of my personal dislikes in a lot of real-time strategy games is the focus on resource collecting. Whilst it can make for a fun element, and has been a feature of the RTS genre pretty much since the beginning, there can at times be little more frustrating than watching your well-laid plans go to waste, as your excellent tactics and strategies on the battlefield are defeated by the weight of sheer numbers, as a result of your opponent spending so much time on the resource-gathering.

Company of Heroes takes an interesting slant on this aspect of RTS games, by providing players with the basic resource at essentially the same rate. The Manpower resource is technically linked to positions captured and held on the map, but the basic income is far in excess, and troops on the field must be paid for via upkeep costs that keep the stronger sides in check. On the other hand, the supplementary resources of Munitions and Fuel are almost entirely determined by capturing, holding and defending key points on the map, forcing players to take ground and keep the supply lines to their bases open. Generally speaking more Munitions means more upgrades and battlefield abilities (such as mines, grenades and panzerschreks) whilst more Fuel means—quite obviously—more vehicles and tanks!

Balance

For a while, Command & Conquer: Generals was my RTS of the hour, a game that despite its many flaws and lack of innovation turned out to be a real joyride. But putting aside for a second the various unpatched bugs, the woeful multiplayer lobby system, the failed rank system, the lack of options for setting up custom games, the immature players, and the ease of mismatching the game, the ONE thing that C&C: Generals really failed at was balance. True, there were three very different sides, each of which eventually had four different flavours in the expansion, bringing the total to 12 separate teams (78 potential head-to-head comparisons!), but nevertheless the game had some very obvious balancing issues which left players refusing to fight opponents who chose team x, or quitting as soon as they saw someone playing team y.

Compatibility

Easily my favourite in this little list, and one of the things that irritates me with so many other games, is that the developers found a way to keep the game engine on the same footing irrespective of which particular version a player had. That is to say, gamers who had the original could play with or against players who bought the expansion pack—including those who only bought the expansion pack—and were simply restricted in their choice of teams and game types. There remains only one version of the game, instead of distinct and incompatible original and expansion pack variants, keeping the gaming lobbies and the community in general far more unified. And leaving players able to play against teams they themselves can’t choose because they haven’t bought the expansion can only help improve sales, or so I’d have thought.

Despite the small scale, there's plenty of variety to be had

Variety

Perhaps the greatest sin perpetrated by strategy games on the whole is their wanton inclusion of units that serve no purpose other than to increase the apparent diversity of the game, but on the field of battle prove about as useful as a pair of flip flops at the Antarctic. Company of Heroes, on the other hand, makes do with relatively reduced number of units per side, but for that makes sure that every unit serves a purpose on the field of battle. Infantry, mortar squads, snipers, anti-tank units, light vehicles, jeeps, tanks, all play a part in the field of battle, and potentially to great effect. Simply bursting through the lines with the heaviest tanks in the game, although a viable strategy, is no guarantee of success as it might be in other games. Cheaper mines, anti-tank weapons and anti-tank specialist squads can all create havoc for an armoured column when employed correctly.

At the same time, Relic managed to create diversity and distinctiveness with the various sides players can choose from. The various infantry groups might appear at first glance to all have much of a muchness about them, but in the field their strengths and weaknesses soon become brilliantly apparent. Each side has its own particular playing style, and deserves different strategies in part or in whole to be played with any measure of success.

Five of the Worst

Bases

Something I’ve railed about elsewhere, and something Relic felt they wouldn’t upset with Company of Heroes, is the seemingly obligatory inclusion of a base. The real-time strategy game formula has essentially from its early beginnings featured the base-building element, and as a result of this heritage, virtually every new game on the market includes bases as part of the package, regardless of whether or not that appears consistent with the game’s ethos and storyline. Training troops, building vehicles, researching technologies: hardly the things you associate with front-line warfare. Nevertheless, there they are in their ubiquitous and downright monotonous forms. Build yourself a barracks and train your troops on the spot: build a tank depot and watch your men weld together a Sherman tank out of a couple of yogurt pots and some sticky-backed plastic.

From the pragmatic point of view of the sales people, I can see why it’s here. People buying RTS games expect a base as par for the course. That’s what RTS is, isn’t it? Building a base, managing your resources, and controlling your troops. Except that this isn’t an RTS you can play like Sim City. The only thing base elements bring to Company of Heroes is essentially an extra Achilles heel targeted by those pesky players who enjoy planting mines in front of buildings and watching freshly produced infantry and vehicles blow up on the spot. In fact, Company of Heroes flaunts its own base-building requirements a good amount of the time, by having new units and reinforcements appear pretty much anywhere but at the base, with units parachuting in, being called in along main roads, or re-appearing at battlefield medical centres.

Portable flamethrowers and a Kangeroo escort

Flamethrowers

The inclusion of flamethrowers was really one of the highs and lows of Company of Heroes. Cheap and dirty to use, the makers at least avoided including common cliches such as flamethrower tanks exploding when randomly hit with small arms fire. Their primary use in the real world, against fortified positions, is also well represented in the Company of Heroes battlefield, with bonuses when used against troops in heavy cover, or against buildings in general (another potentially drastic downside to having a ‘base’).

For all that, however, it seems as if none of the real downsides to the use of man-portable flamethrowers was realistically included in the game. Relative to other firearms, WWII flamethrowers had a relatively short range (albeit not as short as often portrayed in the movies) which forced users to approach with caution and under fire before use. The fuel tanks were also pretty bulky and heavy pieces of kit, a fact that could easily have been implemented in the game mechanics. Indeed, flamethrowers were heavily restricted in their use by the amount of fuel that a man could carry around with him, and some models allowed for only a couple of bursts of fire. In addition, the operators themselves faced tough penalties if captured, due to the nature of the weapon and the horrific injuries and deaths it could inflict; summary execution was not uncommon.

In the real world, such downsides led to rather restricted employment of man-portable flamethrowers, instead with vehicular models rather successfully taking up the role, having few of the drawbacks. Instead, we often see Company of Heroes battlefields littered with groups of Engineers and Pioneers equipped with flamethrowers, decimating other technically more multifaceted troops.

The camouflageable (read: cloakable) M18 Hellcat

Invisibility

Whilst realism was one of my five best things about Company of Heroes, unrealism also sits happily as one of the five worst. The issue with flamethrowers above is a perfect example, but one which pales in comparison next to invisible units. It’s not that they don’t fit into the game ethos at all; having snipers able to move stealthily forward without being seen makes perfect sense, as does being able to infiltrate crack troops behind enemy lines. It’s rather the clumsy nature in which this often jars with realism that makes this feature such a drawback. A Pak-38 anti-tank weapon camouflaged in a hedgerow makes fairly decent sense; an invisible Pak-38 being dragged along an open road in full view of enemy units is frustrating as hell.

When they released the expansion, Tales of Valor, Relic also added a number of optional replacements for many of the vehicle slots in the game, an example of which was the M18 Hellcat, replacement for the M10 Wolverine. Aside from a number of differences in terms of armour, penetration and speed (oddly slower than the M10, despite the M18 being nicknamed the Hellcat on account of its speed), the M18 also featured the ability to camouflage, and benefit from a first strike damage boost.

Looks good on paper, but this has led to some of the most rediculous scenes I’ve ever witnessed in an RTS. In one replay, I saw a small line of M18s all parked in a row on the road, camouflaged and waiting for a target; along came a troop of enemy infantry, who had to squeeze themselves between and around the tanks to get to where they were going! And those 20 x 9 x 9 foot lumps of steel in the middle of the road… they passed them off as shrapnel I suppose?

Western Front

It’s an RTS game set during the Second World War; ergo, it’s pretty much all about the Western Front. How many times must we storm the Normandy beaches? How many times must we discover and destroy the Nazi Vergeltungswaffen? It’s fair point that western audiences will to a large extent be interested in the theatres of war in which their nations were to the largest extent embroiled, but then why do we have so much focus on this one? Fortunately not all games take the same track, and we do occasionally see games set in the Pacific, or North Africa, or the Eastern Front, but then there is seldom any coverage of the smaller conflicts or any attempt to acknowledge the wartime participation of any nations apart from Germany and the Big Three. Relic alone can’t take the blame for this, but it certainly doesn’t count in their favour that they decided to tread the well-worn paths into France. Whilst the expansion pack brought a bit of refreshment in the form of the British and a very distinctive German army, it wasn’t until the truly excellent Eastern Front mod released earlier this year that we got to see the German armies take on the Red Army.

AI

This is very much a nitpicky final point, largely since there aren’t actually that many areas in which the game can be faulted. The AI itself is pretty reasonable, probably average for an RTS game. It doesn’t do anything particularly smart, nor react particularly well to finding fortified positions, and occasionally gets itself stuck in a hole. I’ve seen the AI sneak behind enemy lines with a handful of troops, only to send them to the corner of the map to have a long tea break until the game was over! Nevertheless, whilst the AI doesn’t necessarily provide any particularly staunch opposition, it is very adept at providing hours of frustration, particularly when you’re just starting to get the ropes of the game. No matter how long the game drags on, it seems, the AI seems completely addicted to sending tiny squads of engineers behind your lines and capturing points willy-nilly. It doesn’t matter if the balance is in your favour, it doesn’t matter if you go around mopping up those squads in a matter of seconds before they even manage to capture a single point, the AI will continue to attempt to spread itself across the map, like some form of demented virus pretty much until the end of the game.