Company of Heroes

I know, I know old game is old, but thanks to IGN for turning me onto it. It's a World War II RTS (real time strategy) so I just kind of shoved it off as being another WW2 game where you shoot at Nazis. Then to psyche myself up for the release of Starcraft II, IGN had an article about RTS games that are pretty darn good, to help perpetuate the excitement for Starcraft II. Browsing through the article brought Company of Heroes to my attention. The game sounded to appeal to me in the way it works and the fact I had not played it yet. Needless to say, I can't believe I waited so long to play this. It isn't as large as Starcraft, it isn't a sci-fi setting, and it came out a while ago, but it was quite a fun play.

Now, I do realize that WW2 has been done to death and adding an RTS style didn't really inspire me to try it out. You have tanks and infantry to run into the grinder and after awhile the Nazis retreat back to base. The story here is no different, but it's an RTS so it's more about the tactics than the story. After the typical first stage of running up the beaches in the invasion, you begin taking control of Alpha company. Nothing really special about Alpha company, just your average band of respawning brothers. This initial beach invasion serves as a basic tutorial though, so nothing too concerning when your soldiers are getting blown up all over the beach. Once you get setup on the beach the game becomes are a series of attack or defend missions, my personal favorites being the defend maps. Most battles are a series of rock-paper-scissor face offs where you use heavy weapons to take out armor and you use your armor to take on infantry. Your infantry consist of riflemen, MGs, snipers, morters, and engineers, with the engies being the most useful. Your armor are heavy tanks, flamethrower tanks, and tank destoryers. I do realize that the tanks have names, but this is what I called them as I played. There are options for a few other vehicles, but I honestly rarely used them. Eventually you open up the ability to start pumping out more infantry and armor to soak of the gun fire and they quickly become your leaders into fire fights. As you progress through each map you unlock various "power-ups" that allow you to call in artillery strikes or enable you to build stronger tanks. These don't immediately become useful but are almost required on some of the later stages. After getting a sampling of everything your build options open up and these upgrades force you to travel down a selected upgrade tree. At this point it's a good idea to have an idea of which upgrade path you want to travel because it would be your only choice.

The goals of each map are laid out for you, but ultimately it comes down to driving the Nazi force off the map or some variation there-of. As you progress through the maps you will be constantly moving your invasion forces up and the bringing up more troops to fortify these newly claimed territories. It operates off a control point scheme similar to the Warhammer RTS's, with each point captured add resources into a your resource pool that you will use to call in more troops or set-up defense for said fortification. Quickly it becomes a running troops back and forth to push forward without losing the captured points. I'll admit there are a few stages which I had to try several times over again to try different strategies if one didn't work and sometimes just to see if there was a better way to do things. The difficulty of the game progressed throughout the game, but nothing that can't be overcome by using what you know works and use your resources smartly. Though the final stage just kind of ended abruptly for me, but it was for the best because I was in a pretty bad situation. Still didn't know what I did to win, but I did it and it was worth the play. Should only take me a few more years to try the expansions.