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Monday 3 March, 2008
Company of Heroes
Gamelog Part II
GAMEPLAY:
After successfully completing the tutorial missions, I moved into the single player campaign which was played through the allied side. Once done playing with the first two levels I got some insight as to how the RTS focuses on quick battle and shifting frontlines. The gameplay in Company of Heroes is all about frontline combat, and forces you to quickly explore the map. You typically start out with a headquarters and a squad of engineers, who can build structures and setup defenses. Maps are divided up into territories that all have a resource point in them, and the resources you'll need are manpower, munitions, and fuel. Infantry may capture neutral or enemy resource points, causing them to indefinitely contribute a flow of the given resource to your military efforts while also increasing the total number of units you can have in your army. Although all of these steps seem pretty remedial and easy going, to perfect the skills to build up a diverse army and hold off the repeated attacks from the German soldiers and tanks, it challenged me immensely and will challenge many veteran gamers.
I liked the very historic battles and cut scenes that provided a very lifelike progression of events. The very first level/battle was the invasion of Normandy beaches and then shifts kind of backwards to the night before when Airborne troops are dropped behind enemy lines.(Although I havent finished the game, after this review I plan on going back to the single player to finish the campaign mode and hopefully try out the multiplayer game mode) Most of the missions are excellent and include objectives beyond the typical seek and destroy you find in so many RTS titles. Some missions will ask to capture and hold a road for a convoy while others charge with setting defenses against a German counterattack. Others still assign the duty of crushing lines of retreating Axis forces. Often times missions will begin with smaller objectives such as the capture of a forward base after which a mid-mission briefing will set up the action for the remainder of the level. Company of Heroes gameplay was addicting and fast paced and acted much more like a FPS rather than a slower RTS game. I can't wait to finish the game and perfect my attacking/defending/gathering skills in multiplayer mode.
DESIGN:
COH is one of the RTS games that have raised the bar for the genre. In terms of visuals and audio, COH is second to none. This advanced technical aspect of the game provides for a realistic and engulfing RTS that needs to be ported to other games in the futre.The truly amazing visuals in Company of Heroes demand a top-of-the-line system and a cutting-edge graphics card to get the most out of them. On more-modest systems, you can strip away a lot of the detail to improve the game's performance, but seeing the game in all its glory is truly a sight to behold especially its various types of explosions that fill the screen with fire, smoke, and debris.The detail that went into everything on the battlefield is extreme especially when taking the massive destruction into account.
Another design aspect to the game which made the gameplay even more realistic was the game camera that was used to view the battlefield. The default camera perspective is optimal for gameplay, but you can zoom right in to clearly see each individual soldier and his gear, or how a tank, turning a tight corner through a city street, might take a chunk right out of the side of a building. This level of visual fidelity far exceeds what's previously been done in a strategy game. But it's not just for show, since the graphics' realism helps make the gameplay itself more engrossing and intuitive. Some of the scenes that were zoomed in actually looked more like scenes from a Saving Private Ryan than a real time strategy that I had to be controlling. Just these distinct features in an RTS makes it stand out more than other RTS games. Only other games in the future with DX10 and an amazing game developer like Relic will replicate the stunning visuals and audio that came with COH.
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