Company of Heroes is a
visually stunning real-time strategy game that depicts all the violent chaos of
World War II with uncommon intensity. Set during the invasion of Normandy toward the end
of the war, Company of Heroes takes its cues from Saving Private Ryan, by portraying both the sheer brutality of the war as well as
the humanity of its combatants. Many other recent WWII games have also drawn
influence from Steven Spielberg's landmark film, but Company of Heroes is even
more graphic. This and the game's highly authentic-looking presentation are its
distinguishing features, and it boasts some frantic, well-designed strategic
and tactical combat to match. Company of Heroes trades a wide breadth of
content for an extremely detailed look at WWII-era ground combat, and its
action is so fast paced that it's best suited for the reflexes of an
experienced RTS player. So if you're unfazed by any of that, you'll find that
this latest real-time strategy game from the developers of Homeworld and
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, most dramatic and exciting
examples in years. Provided you have a powerful-enough system and graphics card
to fully appreciate the visuals in Company of Heroes, you'll quickly be struck
by the level of detail depicted in the game. Infantry move in teams, darting
from cover to cover. They may be ordered to occupy any building on the map, and
you'll see them shutter the doors and take aim out the windows. Vehicles are
shown to scale, so tanks and other armored vehicles look big and imposing, and,
indeed, they are. Infantry seem almost helpless against tanks, and you'll hear
the men screaming as tank shells explode around them, sending bodies flying,
while lucky survivors dive out of the way. Yet by attacking a tank's vulnerable
sides and rear armor with explosives, it's possible to turn the tables on these
lumbering threats...turning one of the most basic confrontations in Company of
Heroes into a thrilling cat-and-mouse game, much more than a typical clash
between a couple of RTS units. What's more, the battlefields themselves have at
least as much character to them as the various infantry squads and vehicles as
your disposal. The quaint French towns that are the set pieces of many of the
game's skirmishes truly look as if a war was waged there once the battle is
done, since buildings will catch fire and collapse, telephone lines will
topple, blackened craters will appear in the wake of artillery blasts, and
more. These changes aren't just cosmetic, either. Those blast craters provide
cover for your infantry, while the ruined husks of blown-up tanks might
interfere with a machine gunner's line of fire. The game focuses on the Allies'
invasion of German-occupied Normandy
in 1944, specifically on close-quarters skirmishes between infantry and armor.
Company of Heroes presents a number of novel twists to real-time strategy
conventions, but at heart this game works like other RTS games do, by putting
you in charge of base construction, resource gathering, and tactical command of
various military forces in an effort to defeat the opposition. The game
includes a good-sized single-player campaign spanning more than a dozen
missions, in which Able Company lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day, liberates a
number of key towns and strategic points, disrupts German supply lines and
secret weapons, and finally helps crush the remnants of the Nazi war machine in
France. It's an exciting campaign, tied together with cutscenes and mission
briefings coming from a variety of voices, which creates a few threads that
help tie the missions together. In addition to the campaign, you can play
skirmish matches with up to seven computer-controlled players on a series of
different maps, and you can also jump online into the proprietary Relic Online
service to challenge other players in ranked and unranked matches. The Relic
Online service is a cut above most similar offerings, and lets you easily find
a ranked match against players of similar skill or host a match with your own
custom settings. Because of its limited scope of the Second World War, Company
of Heroes has only the two playable factions, which it calls the Allies and the
Axis--but really they're the Americans and the Germans. In the campaign, you
always play as forces from Able Company and you're always fighting the Germans.
There isn't a separate campaign from the German perspective, though the Axis
faction is fully playable in skirmish matches and online, and turns out to be
fairly different from the Allies despite the basic similarities between the two
sides' weaponry. In fact, in a strange departure from similar games, Company of
Heroes always forces you to play Allies versus Axis, even in multiplayer
matches. Matches with more than two players are always team-based, with one
side as the Allies and the other as the Axis, and so forth. While the game's
units and battlefields are unusually detailed, it's hard not to wish for
additional playable factions and a greater variety of settings, especially
given how well Company of Heroes handles the American and German sides.
2002's Conflict: Desert
Storm gave players squad-based tactical action with a tie-in to modern military
history. As you'd gather from the name, the game was set in the Middle East
during the early 1990s' Operation: Desert Storm--the famed military action against
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
Its current-events context notwithstanding, the first Conflict just wasn't very
good. Just a year and a half later, we've received a direct sequel titled
Conflict: Desert Storm II. The hasty release of a follow-up was no doubt
spurred by the political and military events of the last year. However, the new
Conflict is quite an improvement over the extremely shaky first game. Though
there's been a more recent conflict in Iraq, and military action in the
region is, in fact, ongoing, Conflict: Desert Storm II again places you in the
thick of the 1991 campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime. There's not a whole
lot of story to speak of in the game. You get a linear progression of 10
missions, each of which has its own setting and unique mission objectives and
some of which are revealed in-game as you progress. You command a squad of four
specialists in each mission, and, at the beginning of a new game, you can
choose either American Delta Force or British SAS personnel. Your selection
here slightly affects stats, appearance, and voice acting. Each of your team
members is equipped with a weapon that gives him a unique function. There's the
assault rifle-wielding team leader, the sniper, the demolitions expert, and the
heavy machine gunner. The team members do have actual names and unique
appearances, so you've got at least a little more attachment to them than if
they were just faceless drones.The core squad and combat mechanics in Desert
Storm II are a little awkward at the outset, but with some practice you can get
fairly proficient at playing the game. In the main single-player game, you can
switch between your four teammates by hitting up and down on the D pad. Each of
the four (whichever one is active) squad members can issue individual or group
orders to the others by using a number of button combinations. You can tell
your teammates to hold position or form up behind you, hit the dirt, advance on
the enemy and fire at will, and so on. As long as you keep tabs on your teammates'
health and actively switch between them regularly, you can progress through the
game's missions without worrying too much about suffering casualties. Leaving
three of your buddies in the care of the game's squad AI isn't the best idea,
though at least they'll be proactive about fighting enemies. They'll fire at
their enemies but will often get themselves killed in the process. Of course,
you can issue orders to bring them back behind cover, but that can be difficult
when you're in the middle of a firefight and are worrying about saving your own
skin. Overall, it would have been nice if the teammate AI was a little more
adaptive when left to its own devices.
A solid port is nothing to scoff at. Prototype
2 finally makes its way to the PC after
debuting on the xbox 360 and play station 3 back in April, and the transition has been kind to this brutal
open-world adventure. The biggest difference between this version and its
console brethren is the slightly improved visuals. Greater draw distance and a
higher frame rate showcase your murderous rampage in a more impressive light.
Because the technical aspects have been translated with nary a hitch, it's easy
to lose yourself in the destructive glee of this unrepentant sequel. Prototype
2 isn't the least bit novel, but it's so utterly ridiculous that it's hard to
wipe the smile from your face. One thing you should keep in mind is that
Prototype 2 is at its best with a controller. The fast-paced fighting and
empowering exploration come together seamlessly when you have a couple of
analog sticks and responsive buttons. If you're using a keyboard, you can still
blow through the papier-mache enemies, but the actions don't play out as
smoothly. Holding down three keys to glide through the city takes a bit of
finger gymnastics, and zeroing in on one attacker in a crowd is even tougher
with a mouse. It's easy enough to get used to these quirks with a little
practice, but Prototype 2 doesn't feel as as natural with a keyboard and mouse.
In contrast to the
devil-may-care attitude showcased in the majority of the adventure, the story
does take itself seriously. A military force has quarantined a major metropolis
under the guise of protecting citizens from a viral outbreak, but their
occupancy is far from altruistic. In reality, they are conducting bioweapon
research, and the people are just unlucky cattle being led to slaughter. It's a
morbid situation that makes it satisfying to kill your opposition--defense
contractor Blackwatch--as you hunt down the higher-ups who ordered this
atrocity.And you can enjoy this game…
Company of Heroes is a
visually stunning real-time strategy game that depicts all the violent chaos of
World War II with uncommon intensity. Set during the invasion of 
2002's Conflict: Desert
Storm gave players squad-based tactical action with a tie-in to modern military
history. As you'd gather from the name, the game was set in the Middle East
during the early 1990s' Operation: Desert Storm--the famed military action against
Saddam Hussein's invasion of 
