Company Of Heroes

Written by: Rodo Abad

Posted on: Dec 23, 2009 12:00:00 AM

Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ. The game is set during World War II where the player commands either 29th Infantry Division's Able Company or the 101st Airborne's 506th parachute infantry regiment Fox Company. The player takes part in major American operations during the battle of Normandy.

Requirements

Windows
3Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent
512MB 8200 graphics card or equivalent
7GB HDD space

Installation

Steam updates all of your games with the latest patches and having seen the amount of patches for CoH, I'm glad I installed it via Steam.

First Impressions

I think everyone already knows this but just in case this is your first time, I'm a fan of RTS games. From Westwood's C&C to Blizzard's Warcraft and Starcraft, I think I pretty much played most of the great RTS games out there. I love micro-managing my units! Having played Company of Heroes for the very first time, it somewhat reminded me of Command and Conquer Generals except that it's during WWII. hearing each unit's voice over just made it really feel like a WWII game. And if you really want to max out your DX10 experience with this game, I suggest you start upgrading your hardware. It's well worth it.

Singleplayer

As far as being a WWII RTS game, I think CoH nailed it. I do have some knowledge about WWII but I don't know the technical details of each WWII hardware or machine and it's always mind-bugling for me why the US units seem to be more powerful than their German counterparts (even with the higher difficulty settings). The more time you spent with the game the more you'll know that once you get M4 Sherman tanks, it's over for the Germans. That's it, you win. Even if they have Panzers. If you think about it though...that's what history will tell you

Multiplayer

I can't really describe my multi-player experience with CoH. Because deep inside I want to role-play some more but my competitive brain tells me to get on with it and try to win every single game. There's only a couple of 'pure servers' available if you don't want to lag that much but there's certainly a lot of choices if you really don't mind where to play.

Final Thoughts

I absolutely love CoH but the game is far from perfect like for example when alt-tabbing, it changes the saved resolution and reverts back to a default one. When recording or taking screenshots, you get the black screen bug depending on your settings i.e. if I set AA to 2x, I'll get it but ifI set it to 4x or higher, then I don't get it. Things like that ruin a game even if it's not directly related to the game itself.