Company of heroes plus#

You get search and destroy missions, missions where you must capture and hold particular control points, and missions where you must just defend for a specific amount of time, as Kapitan Kraut throws wave after wave of axis terror at you. And best of all, there’s a surprising amount of variety. You may start missions without a base and have to set one up, or not have one the whole way through, forcing you to call in paratroops when you need new reinforcements. You may begin a mission with simple objectives, but these can change radically halfway through, as the fiendish German forces attack or counter-attack, or as Allied defences crumble.

Company of heroes plus#

However, you can easily forget this, because Relic isn’t playing by the normal boring RTS rules.įor a start, the campaign missions are heavily cinematic, with opening and concluding cut-scenes in the Call of Duty 2 style, plus linking scenes that play out as each mission progresses. There is still some degree of base building and base fortification, and the game uses a system of control points to stock up on fuel, munitions and manpower – the three resources in the game. Now, in truth, Company of Heroes doesn’t throw this entirely out of the window. Expand territories and harvest resources 4. What a refreshing idea!īut the thing that really impresses – and that will keep you coming back for more – is the core gameplay itself. You can take detailed control, ordering them to move aggressively or rain grenades or satchel bombs on enemy positions, but you don’t have to constantly micro-manage them. They will find their own cover as they advance towards an objective, stop to return fire when attacked, and attempt to break for shelter when pinned down. In a lesser game this would be a nightmare, but in Company of Heroes your guys on the ground seem aware of their own mortality.

In Company of Heroes, as in Call of Duty 2, position and cover are everything, and getting caught out in the open is frequently a fatal error, wiping out whole squadrons at a stroke.

Be warned.Įven before that happens, you might notice that your troops don’t behave like the usual mindless morons. In a genre that frequently struggles to make a strong visual impression, Company of Heroes smacks your gob so hard that after a few hours you might not have much of a gob left. Buildings shatter when wracked by tank or mortar fire, walls will be rent asunder by speeding armoured cars, and artillery strikes fill the ground with smoke and craters. If you can see it, you can wreck it, and this makes for some truly spectacular scenes. Then, as your troops rush into action, the tanks roll into town and the masonry starts flying, it hits you how interactive and open to destruction this battlefield is. Zoom in close and watch engineers build a bunker or Nazi troops spitting fire from a machine gun, and it’s one of the few RTS games that can actually stand that sort of close inspection. What’s so great about it? Well, like Call of Duty 2, a lot of the appeal is initially visual, lying in the astonishing level of gritty detail, the realistic animation of the soldiers, the rich surface textures and dynamic particle effects. Company of Heroes is one of this year’s few bona fide classics.

Even if you never wanted to see another RTS or another WWII game in your life – and certainly not something that combined the two – you really should change your mind about this one. Like Infinity Ward’s WWII FPS, it uses new technology, cinematic techniques and great game design to persuade you to play a type of game you should be sick and tired of, and actually make it feel fresh and thrilling. It’s always curious when the first game a new title brings to mind is something in a completely different genre, but if Relic’s new RTS has a comparison point, it’s last year’s Call of Duty 2.