While I’m not a huge RTS fan, I do enjoy the occasional game, and this one caught my eye. So, I played the first couple of missions last night. The visuals are really pretty amazing for an RTS, although too often they try to stretch their engine too far in the cut-scenes with rather silly looking results. In game from a suitable sky high distance, things look great. Explosions are wonderful, bodies and debris fly, buildings collapse, and bullets rip across the screen. Everything from buildings to scenery can be used to intelligently provide your troops cover, meaning you’re not just standing in the open taking shots until someone falls down.
One of my big RTS turnoffs is the amount of work one must put into resource management. Thankfully Company of Heroes simplifies resources drastically and focuses mainly on the combat side of things. Resources are just a matter of controlling points, smartly laid out on a handy territory mini-map. Once you control a point, a constant stream a resources will come your way. Manpower is constantly coming in, and the more territory you’ve got, the more you get. In these early levels at least, this means that even if your front line squad gets wiped out, you’ll soon have the resources regenerated to train new troops.
So far I’m digging it. I’m not sure if it’ll hold my interest across the entire single player campaign, but it seems varied enough to do so. The tactical map laying out points of interest and such really makes this feel more like an action-strategy game and less like a resource management, base building game. Despite being in the same genre, it’s pretty much the opposite of games like Age of Empires. It simply would have been nice if it wasn’t yet another WWII game.
