Company Of Heroes Pc Game

[Giovanni Sealy]

LtJoe Conti: [after Nate wakes up at the hospital] My name is Lieutenant Conti... and I have with me a letter from our division commander. It's of highest importance. "No words could express how grateful we are... for what you and your squad were able to accomplish, given the circumstances. Today, we are truly in the company of heroes." Now, the device that you brought back... that was the very definition of priceless. And I promise you this: History will prove that it was worth every life lost in its pursuit.

Lt. Joe Conti: Now, that being said... none of what you did, or saw, or learned... from the morning of the German bombardment to your return to this CP... ever happened. There'll be no medals, no commendations, no promotions. You can't tell your family. Hell, you can't even tell your preacher. None of this happened. Do you understand?

It's called Company of Heroes 2 , but it's a long way into the 15-hour campaign before Relic's real-time strategy game finds any heroism. It's set on World War II's frigid Eastern Front, and is more concerned with rifle-butting home the horror of that bloodiest sector of the conflict. The Eastern Front saw the brunt of the war: Germany lost 80% of its Wehrmacht casualties east of Berlin; the Soviets themselves lost some 26 million souls overall, 8.6 million of whom were in the military.

Learning about this is harrowing; playing it is too. The Soviet war effort hinged on the country's ability to spit out prodigious amounts of young men and women to fight and die for their motherland. That quirk of population translates to game mechanics: as Soviet general-in-the-sky, I had a near-endless stream of people I could click on to send to their doom. In most missions, squads can be trained at your home base or brought into battle as conscripts. This second type of soldier gives Company of Heroes its Soviet tinge, and can sometimes make it unsatisfying to play.

They're not rendered in the game's engine and they're not fancy CG, looking more like some terrible Xbox shooter, animated as if their actors were having their emotions signed to them off-stage a minute too late. Isakovich watches in Stalingrad as a commissar gives a machine gunner the order to shoot retreating troops. The gunner pauses for a moment before turning awkwardly on the spot, grinning like he's been told a joke, and shooting all his mates. There's historical poignancy in there but it staggers under clumsy delivery methods.

The burden of history weighs particularly heavily on the early quarter of the campaign. With the Germans pushing into Russia, the Soviet forces are in full retreat, meaning many missions aren't won so much as vacated. One asks you to flee the map, burning villages as you go. Another cast me into one final Soviet-held capture point with a broken and scattered force, before flashing up my next objective: 'hold out against waves of enemies: 0/10'. I managed to hold out against a glorious zero waves on my first go, and as my men were pulverised and the screen faded to black, I planned how better to spread them out to hold the line. I was surprised to see the words 'mission complete'. It certainly didn't feel that way.

But there is glory here, and there are heroes. Company of Heroes 2's quieter missions are its most memorable. One level in Polish territory gave me control of a super-sniper and a few squads of her resistance chums. Unlike most squads, the snipers would hold fire until directly ordered to shoot, making traversing the Polish forests a pleasingly efficient military exercise: move one set of snipers to the treeline to provide cover for another leapfrogging duo, before destroying an enemy squad with six carefully aimed bullets fired in a single devastating salvo.

Another level deposited me and a handful of ill-equipped conscripts in a freezing town, asking us to take down a near-indestructible Tiger tank with ingenuity and planning. This mission made good use of Company of Heroes 2's true line-of-sight: without eyes on my tanky target, I was left bumbling around in the cold. After a few of my squad were squished under its 70-tonne tracks, I began to lay down tripwires and traps. Eventually crippling the big bastard caused a real-life fistpump, a gesture repeated when I got to shoot its driver, commandeer it, patch it up and drive it home. These levels show CoH2's moving parts working to drive the war machine forwards.

Relic want you to jettison the remnants of battered squads, trading them off for better upgrades as the mission goes on, but the process isn't properly explained or justified. It's completely counterintuitive, the kind of design decision that should've been summarily shot in the head at an early stage in development: especially when the layout of some bases meant my cowardly retreaters were able to hide behind buildings to stay out of the commissar's eyeline and avoid the death penalty.

That's if it was able to process that much information. CoH2's AI is a bit suspect, leading to some confusing scenarios. I'm no expert in mechanised warfare, but I don't think the Wehrmacht's primary tank tactic on spotting enemy vehicles was to jam their steel charges into high gear and trundle towards the foe like affectionate puppies, stopping a few metres short with their thinly-armoured arse flapping in the freezing breeze.

It almost makes sense for the Germans' heavier tanks to perform such ramming manoeuvres, but then the little tank destroyers have a tendency to do it too. German soldiers display a similar level of battlefield awareness, struck by a Wehrmacht-wide case of short-term memory loss. Grenadiers will hit the ground as one of their number is shot in the neck by a sniper, only to pop back out of cover a minute later, having forgotten about the leaking corpse that used to be Jrgen lying in the dirt next to them.

Pathfinding was also a problem for some of my troops. Had I not intervened when an anti-tank gun's turret stretched a few metres past an overhang, I think most of the Red Army would still be stranded east of Warsaw. Luckily, these are the only technical problems: the game ran smoothly on mid-range AMD and Intel CPUs, and came with the suite of graphical options you'd expect from such a PC-centric title.

Even that weak enemy AI is less of a problem than you'd expect. After the retreats of the campaign's first third, the Red Army has time to coalesce and push back. For much of the rest of the story I was driving the steamroller inexorably closer to Berlin. Enemies in my path were like locks that I could choose to either smash through or delicately unpick. Against tougher foes, both approaches felt good.

Co-op missions are similarly freeform. Both generals can choose to mix and match similar forces and push together on their objectives, or to coordinate and specialise. This is Company of Heroes as an aggressive kid's toybox, allowing you to either pull out your favourite soldiers to win the fight your way, or asking you to battle back against almost-overpowering odds in a way the campaign rarely does.

And despite the niggles and deficiencies I've pointed out here, I do want to go back and kill them. CoH2 takes its lessons from history very literally. Like the Red Army it depicts, it wages its war by throwing everything forward at once, and like that Red Army, too many casualties were left to die along the way. It's sometimes clumsy, a game that can't maintain all its systems, with too many disparate moving parts to feel consistently coherent. But the final result, despite the small losses along the way, is a winner.

The Italian campaign simply doesn't work as anything other than a miserable framework for delivering skirmishes and missions that the previous two games served up better. What may have been a triumphant and explosive RTS campaign is instead a massive dud.

If you ignore all of that story and campaign context, which you might, the scenario and map design in both North Africa and Italy are actually quite good. The maps consistently present fun situations that understand how maneuver is at the heart of Company of Heroes firefights. It's so much fun to maneuver units from place to place, with infantry vaulting over obstacles or diving for cover as vehicles struggle to navigate cramped roadways or tanks smash through walls and buildings.

Speaking of which, CoH3's four skirmish factions stand out as a remix of, and set of highlights from, the series' past. For example, the focus of the campaigns being earlier in the war leaves some tanks out entirely, like the ubiquitous Panther and infamous King Tiger, and draws in some famous early-war vehicles like the dual-gunned Grant tank and Panzer III. Americans are fast-moving and aggressive, inspired by the first Company of Heroes. The British forces are a diverse set of straightforward unit types, unlike their prior incarnations as the complex faction, and have surprise appearances by some exceptional elite units. The regular German Wehrmacht is just as defensive-minded and tough as ever, but this incarnation is notably absent their heaviest vehicles, instead emphasizing diverse combined arms. Finally, the Deutsches Afrikakorps is a mobile, focused force that can both call in specialized Italian allies and transition to a hard hitting armored fist late-game.

Writing this review hurt my feelings. The Company of Heroes series is near and dear to my heart \u2013 all three of them are real-time strategy games that cut to the core of the genre, focusing on overarching strategic decisions coupled with tactical troop movements and a battlefield that truly matters. I'm pleased to say that Company of Heroes 3 implements those series fundamentals quite well in a gentle remix that brings the series to diverse theaters of World War 2 that it hadn't touched yet. What I'm very displeased about is that the ambitious Italian campaign mode is incredibly disappointing. While individual missions and scenarios within the strategic sandbox are strong and even thrilling at times, almost every feature on the strategic map doesn't work, either because it's bugged or because it's such middle-of-the-road game design that it's simply boring.

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