ThinkGaming.org - Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and More!

Company of Heroes is a World War 2 real-time strategy game. Its polished look, ensconcing soundtrack, and efficient gameplay mechanics really show off Relic’s ability to make high-quality, memorable games. Read on for the review.

Introduction

Company of Heroes is a World War 2 real-time strategy game. Its polished look, ensconcing soundtrack, and efficient gameplay mechanics really show off Relic’s ability to make high-quality, memorable games. Read for the review.

Installation Thoughts

Company of Heroes took an incredibly long time to install-almost 20 minutes. The game data occupies about 4 GB of disk space, so it’s certainly no surprise that it would take that long, despite my SATA DVD drive. The bottleneck was probably my PATA/133 hard drives.

The backgrounds during the install are, I believe, taken from the game’s movies. These are fantastic, painted scenes that are every so slightly animated. It’s really like a very, very artsy comic book-one where the entire story could be told without a line of dialog. It also displays information about the times leading up to and immediately after June 6, 1944, D-Day.

While it was installing, I checked out the manual-as a small lad, my mother always made me read a rented game’s manual before I could play it, so RTFM’ing is a part of my new-game ritual. There’s really not a lot in the manual. There’s some explanation of the various HUD elements and statistical information about each of the game’s units.

There’s a CD key required, but you don’t need the disc in the drive to play! Congratulations, Relic, on trusting your users.

One very, very annoying part of the installer is that it automatically starts the game when finished. This caused Windows to freak out, as I run Folding@Home and it is fickle when changing resolutions to those other than the one Windows is set to use.

Game Thoughts

This game is beautiful. I’ve got a 4400+ and a 7800GTX/OC. I jacked up the settings to full-1680×1050. It’s not just pretty, it’s functional and very well lit. Throughout the game and its menus, gentle pulses in color afford clicking, reminding the user to take some action.

I played through the tutorial, having found little instruction in the manual. Then I played the first few missions to get a good feel for the game.

Tutorial

All four sections of the tutorial-Basics, Infantry, Basic Ops, and Armor-are succinct. Each gives just enough information to give the user basic information needed to direct troops and then let the user decide how to accomplish the mission give this small amount of additional information. Kudos.

In my notes, I wrote this: "Very trivial to control, and very easy to remember."

Shopping

Pages: 1 2