Company of Heroes

There is a strong subset of gaming snobs who don’t play real time strategy games. Too twitchy. Too much clicking. Not enough strategy and not enough tactics. Among RTS die-hards there is group that avoids World War II themed games because the setting is overdone, and rarely well.

Company of Heroes drops into this crowded and disillusioned scene like a paratroop assault – totally unexpected and completely devastating to whatever preconceptions you had going in. This could be the best real time strategy game since Age of Empires.

It’s not hard to see why it works, either. Company of Heroes takes the familiar resource gathering RTS model and almost makes a wargame out of it. Your ability to produce units is entirely dependent on how much ground you can capture and hold. You don’t manage peons, like in most RTS games, and you don’t just have to make do with whatever you start with, like most WW2 themed real time games. Skirmishes start with a headquarters, an engineer unit and some machine gun emplacements. You know precisely what the map layout is and where the victory points are. Now go. Eventually you get into a rhythm where you seize forward buildings and fortify them while your army men run around claiming resource points. The Axis and Ally sides have very different building trees, though comparable units, so whatever your enemy does to you is something you can do to him. The computer opponent poses a strong challenge even on normal difficulty, so you’ll get a chance to see tanks blowing away your riflemen.

There is a surprising amount of tactical challenge in Company of Heroes, and not simply because of the tough computer opponent. Machine gun nests aren’t just tougher enemies – they can wipe out a large number of opponents if approached from the front. You’ll need to hit tanks from the rear or side if you want a quick kill, and somebody may have to be a hero (i.e., die) if you want infantry to clear a barn of a sniper. Before long, you will find yourself protecting chokepoints or planting mines to delay the attack you know is coming.

A good example is the distinction made between light and heavy cover. You can crouch behind a row of bushes and be better off than the poor saps coming at you across an open field, but they can get behind a stone wall or in a house, you are the one in trouble. Making the most of the terrain you are given becomes essential. Changing the terrain, doubly so. If you haven’t got the men to keep a fuel depot, you can fortify it to prevent easy capture. Lay mines or a row of tank barriers to bar a bridge. But, since this will cost you resources, you can’t turn everything into the Maginot Line. No defense will help you if it’s unmanned.

It’s not quite fair to talk about the “feelings” that a game evokes, since this is highly dependent on how much of a softie you are, but there is a real Band of Brothers vibe going on here, especially in the campaign. Your troops run and curse, and there are usually so few of them that the loss of a single group can cause real sorrow even if it is only in a cold-hearted “We lost the bridge!” way.

The campaign makes all the usual stops in the Liberation of Europe from D-Day onward, but has some interesting mission design. Victory in the campaign scenarios is dependent on meeting objectives, but there is usually more than one way to meet them. An early scenario, for example, suggests you use satchel bombs to destroy German bunkers. There is an easier way to do it, though, and you aren’t penalized for finding it.

Multiplayer and other skirmish sessions get frantic, but not in the usual real time way. You don’t lasso your troops and throw them into the fray, hoping for the best. You look for strong defensive positions and try to make them stronger. You scout for your enemy’s defenses and try to find a way past the machine gun emplacements or snipers. You can’t win this game with pure numbers, since the numbers in play are usually quite small. There is a loose rock/paper/scissors mechanic in place (snipers especially need a strong counter) but careful approaches, ambushes and judicious use of the special powers will be much more important.

Ah, yes. The special powers. As intelligent as your soldiers are (they’ll hit the deck or run for cover) you need to micromanage things like grenades or armor piercing shells. This can make for stressful moments when stormtroopers start hitting Able Company on both sides of the map. Even more curiously, when their morale starts breaking, you need to manually order a retreat to base where they can get reinforced. This micromanagement never gets to be too overwhelming since you aren’t controlling dozens of units at any single time. Prioritize the missions and trust that your machine gunner will be OK until the tanks show up.

Just like the real war, there comes a point where you recognize that victory or defeat is inevitable. The game is entirely dependent on the control of resource points – you can’t make up shortages in fuel or ammo through a tech upgrade or a market like in other resource based games. So if you get all your fuel paths cut and can’t re-establish any in a timely fashion, it becomes increasingly impossible to recover. It’s a slow countdown to defeat unless you can break out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself.

This could be game breaking, but it isn’t. The result is an early emphasis on careful planning and immediate aggression. Instead of going straight to building “real soldiers”, you will send out cheaper engineers to seize and fortify important resource points. Easily defensible paths will be scouted and prepared. If you see the end coming, you can plan a Battle of the Bulge type last stand or try to do significant damage to your opponent. Turtling can work so long as you think of your defensive strategy as an offensive weapon, protecting your staging ground for your next big assault. The mid-game has a lot of to and fro action as the front changes and strategic points are taken. This more than makes up for any sense of impending doom.

And even defeat is satisfying because it is usually immediately apparent what went wrong. Company of Heroes teaches lessons better than most similar games because scenarios and skirmishes aren’t puzzles to be solved, but problems to be worked through. The ability to spend experience points on one of three combat paths means that you will have occasional resort to superpowers that should each be experimented with. You will lose a lot in the early going, but a loss is rarely a matter of not clicking fast enough or guessing the wrong upgrade. The map is exposed, your opponent doesn’t have units you can’t counter and everyone knows where the important locations are.