COMPANY OF HEROES, greatest ww2 game of all time? Hardly..
What is company of heroes?
According to wikipedia, COH ( the shortcut for company of heroes which I will continue to use from now on ) is:
Once I actually played the game, not so much. All I ever read about COH is nothing but praise with stuff like: it's so innovative!, there is cover you can use!, it looks so good!, omg you can blow up buildings!, etc. Did everybody lose his mind or is everybody in the gaming community on Relic's payroll? Let's have a closer look at this now well known game.
Installing the game
The first time I put the DVD in my DVD-drive, I was of course in a hurry to get the game installed. I was itching to play, only to realize the damn installation took forever. Maybe I'm alone on this because I have a slower DVD drive or something, but seriously the installation took more then an hour! And during this installation, I could not do anything at all. The installation took so much from my PC, when I tried to alt tab to surf the web in the meantime the whole thing froze on me forcing me to reinstall all over again. A warning for people with a little older pc like mine, go and make a sandwhich or some coffee while installing cause it'l take a while.
Starting up and playing the first bit of the campaign
Once I actually got ingame, setting up my video and audio wans't hard to do. There is a testmode build in the game so you can see how your framerate is with the current graphical settings. Mind you that this testmode is for a cinematic cutscene, where as I'd much rather have a quick automated battle generated with alot of units and buildings on screen at once for a more accurate reading.
Once completed I clicked on campaign, only to find out that there is no option to play as the germans at all. What we had instead was another cookiecutter Normandy campaign for the American side, oh joy. We haven't played that one yet now have we
O well, let's play anyway to find out what this company full of heroes really is.
A cinematic cutscene introduced me to Omaha beach, where an eager hardass officer runs out of the boat towards the mg42's in the bunkers like he's made of steel only to fall to the bullets in a dramatic pose. You never see the germans, just the hands reloading the machine gun. A little overly dramatic and patriotic aren't we Relic? The screen switches to an ingame view and I'm treated with some squads of soldiers that have just landed. I look around a little to see what's new in the game. Cover is represented by red, yellow or green shields ( bad, medium and good cover ) behind the beach barricades, besides that there's not much to do besides select my squads and have them run further up the beach. This first mission is made extremely easy since lost squads are replaced in a second by spawns at the water, so it's really just rush the beach with everything you have. Once an engineer squad is up to the barbed wire shingle, he blows it up in another dramatic cutscene. After this the only thing left to do is destroy or capture the 88's seen on the screenshot below.
These are pretty inaccurate against infantry apparently so this was a breeze as well. After this, another cutscene where the bunker is breached in a dramatic way by some luitenant or officer you couldn't command as an actual unit.
What was clear for me at this point was that you don't actually command a couple of units where you can get attached too. The entire name of the game is referring to a group of people you don't get to play with, the whole story is about characters you don't see in the actual gameplay. This is of course to prevent "hero X was killed, mission failed" being overly frustrating for the player, forcing them to have units that they will leave in the back of the base in fear of getting them killed. But it seems fake and forced to me.
Another thing that was pretty clear after only the first mission was it's arcadyness. I'm not asking full blown realism here, but COH is a game that takes historical accuracy and kicks it out the window sometimes. This is most likely to differentiate itself in the ww2 RTS genre, but to me because it tries so damn hard to be fun and entertaining it just falls flat on it's face on important stuff like immersion. I've played a ton of ww2 games, almost every gamer has. This results in emidiatly being able to pick out things that just aren't right. After playing and finishing the campaign I have seen:
*AT guns being positioned in a certain arc and fireing in an exreme angle all of a sudden. These things can actually home in on enemy tanks, rendering actual strategic positioning pretty useless.
*Missions where you are suppose to defend certain areas, only to have them AI shelled by invincible offmap artillery which you cannot prevent at all. Why defend these areas if there are prescripted to be destroyed anyway?
*Extremely poor AI pathfinding. Almost every vehicle will get stuck somewhere if you order it to go somewhere without babysitting it click by click. There are mods out there that fix this, but why does Relic ignore such a simple thing since day 1? Seeing 6 panther tanks, 2 tigers and god knows what else all clutterd around a single bridge kind of throws out any immersion you could have out the window.
*Homing sticky bombs, these things were barely used in the war to begin with yet it's the main antitank weapon American infantry has in COH. These actually follow the tank in question if you drive it away when it's thrown, causing you to actually see armor drive around with a glowing bomb sliding behind it. ( for balance reasons they say )
*Balance being biased purely on strategy/game purposes, instead of simple historical use. I've seen patch after patch after patch lately and none of them fix anything, they just screw things up more. Again there are mods that give good examples, but the arcadyness of it all just throws out any balance you could have to begin with. Tanks have health instead of armor, infantry can wade through mgfire because of "elite armor settings" and some can get up instantly when pinned by enemy mgfire because of a skill that says they can.
The rush towards vehicles
In case you don't know and you've never heard about COH, you need to build a few buildings in order to create units and you need to capture strategic points to get resource points just like with w40k dawn of war. Nice in theory, but you always start out at the same places on the map meaning the enemy will always know where your base is, making baserushes extremely easy sometimes if you know how. These buildings are very limited in actual use as well. Every version of COH has seen only a few builds in use online. This usually consisted of: build/tech to the building that has the cheapest best unit you can get atm, spam that unit untill you win or tech a little further.. repeat.
Spam units you say, but isn't that restricted somehow? Well if you get more units, you will get less income as a balance measure and there is also a popcap. A tiger takes up alot more popcap then a squad of infantry for instance. What this actually does for me is destroy immersion even more. You can have all the resources in the world, but because you're at some invisible population limit you can't build anything at all untill some of your units die. But this creates balance people will tell you on Relic forums! If they have a Tiger, they won't have much infantry.. which is exactly my point, why shouldn't a player with a Tiger have some infantry as well? Doesn't that create diverse and combined arms gameplay, something most people desire?
Then there is the function of commander abilities to take into account. Remember in C&C generals where your factory all of a sudden got blown up by some unstoppable artillery just because that player could click a little button, and how annoying it was to not be able to do anything about it? They implimented the exact same system in COH. Killing gives you exp, which enables more skills in the skilltree you've chosen. You're able to get free tanks, airstrikes, etc by the click of a button. These sometimes cost a little resource to use, but I personally despise anything that's click and shoot. It takes no skill at all and you cannot kill the actual artillery when it's shooting at you, eating away the fun out of the game. People will scream imbalance on the balance forums daily of course, which creates for patch after patch screwing things up even more. Free tank? Now it's useless and can't hit the broad side of a barn, have fun!
As a final thing to mention conserning vehicles, they are either very good or extremely useless. The good ones are pretty much nerved by now as well. As I mentioned earlier the pathfinding is terrible, forcing you to babysit each and every vehicle to not have it turn it's rear weak end to the enemy every single time. ( we love micro, the hardcore "pro's" will say! ). The range is pretty crappy as well, meaning tanks will actually rush into AT guns and such to be able to actually return fire to the enemy. MG's on tanks are pretty much useless and can't hit anything most of the time, where as the main guns are usually fixed somehow for balance reasons. Do you see that tank having it's turretgun pointed toward the enemy tank? It doesn't mean it will actually hit, since there is X% chance it will miss. These numbers make combat pure dumb luck ending up in mudslinging rounds back and forth and clicking wildy to try and micro your tanks out of the idiotic AI pathfinding. It's all very silly, yet nobody seems to care about this..
Multiplayer
After the poor campaign and the pretty boring skirmish games I tried ( AI seems to prefer spamming ATguns and armored cars ), I had a go at multiplayer. With the coming of the expansion Opposing Force, two sides have been added namely the British and some sort of Heavy Panzergrenadier company. Both kind of screwed over the already fragile balance in the default game, it's now even more of a mess. I can't even get in the mp game now anymore though, since my router seems to block access to other players in Relic online. This has something to do with not allowing NAT connections and having a shitty router, but yes I've tried everything.. and COH is the only game I have had this specific problem with. Even if you do not have this problem, Relic online is slow, connection types don't show properly, smurfs are everywhere ( smurfs are highranking players under lowlevel accounts ) and you have a good chance of getting a loss counted when you actually won a game or the other way around. To me it's a wonder this game has a community left at all, I guess graphics really are a winning factor these days.
The expansion further explained
Although the expansion adds some nice flavor to the game, it doesn't do anything about the core flaws the game already had. Instead it throws in a turtlerace ( the british ) in a game that's suppose to be about fast moving combat and a side with expansive ubervehicles ( Panzerelite ) when vehicles were already overly dominant in the default game. It's like adding fuel to a fire.. You cannot play Lan with friends on a single disc anymore, because you have to login to Relic online for sp and Lan as well. Relic got kind of frisky conserning pirated copies, hence the constant login measure. Not a good idea imo, since playing Lan with friends on a single DVD actually encourages people to go out and buy the game themselves if they like it.
Note that you can buy and play the expansion without owning regular COH, you won't be able to play as the factions Wehrmacht and Americans if you do though.
What is the point I'm trying to make with this review?
When you read the reviews, all they rant about is how great the coversystem is and terrifc the grahpics are. This assumption is wrong since infantry combat is pretty poor. Yes the coversystem is nice, but the implimentation of the system and it's actual use is overshadowd by certain aspects:
- You can have infantry in bad cover getting shot, with them not taking much damage at all. You can actually see infantry 2 feet away from each other, both in some sort of cover just taking potshots at each other for 2 minutes untill one unit runs out of health. It just looks extremely silly and unrealistic.
- Certain abilities render normal infantry tactics completely useless. Do you see a machine gun as the allies in a building? Just use the grenade button, it will automatically home into the window in question that you click at and will almost always kill 1,2 germans. Need some more power as the Americans? Get the BAR upgrade, in COH these weapons actually function as mini machineguns that instantly surpress people at the click of a button. Not to mention a ton of other silly upgrades, giving simple infantry superhuman abilities.
- When you do finally manage to have some nice somewhat realistic and immersive infantry battles, with infantry and some static defences and garrisoned buildings in place, it usually all goes completely out of the window when vehicles show up. Vehicles wtf kill infantry in most occassions ( unless they are rigged to suck, because they got nerved in patches like the STUGIII ) with them needing a hardcounter in order to fight back.
- The reviewers promised terrific AI, while the infantry AI is ok and the bulk of AI is extremely retarded.
*The campaign is far from epic. Instead it's done before ( enough with Normandy already! ), overly patriotic and stereotypical ( the allies die in slow motion with dramatic dialogue while the germans talk in a strange accent and constantly make fun of themselves ).
- The online lobby is very poor, with only a few maps you can actually play for a ranking.. of which even fewer maps are actually fun to play. Thus you're basically playing the same map over and over ( semois and the other one, Angol or something of the like.. )
- Effective build orders are very limited, in a proper mp game you can almost expect what type of unit the enemy will send just by knowing their faction. Alot of units are almost never used at all.
There are also some good points though, don't get me wrong. The graphics are superb as promised, the destruction you can do is nice and the game runs well on somewhat older machines but my point is this game is not deserving of it's reputation. There are better ww2 rts games out there, I ask you why is this game rated so ridiculously high everywhere? Am I really alone with my disappointment with this game? The engine is terrific and I feel they could have done so much more with this game, campaignwise and overall gameplay wise to make it an instant classic. Instead in it's current state, it's like a Ferrari that's won countless awards with being shiny, yet having an old rusty framework underneath to support it all.
Thanks for reading if you managed to go through it all. It may read off more like a rant, I just had to get it out of my system. I avoid stuff like "you can build units and buildings" in this review, since that's like saying an fps involves guns these days. Balance and gameplay are what's most important to me and they are glaringly flawed in COH.
( and don't go spellings/grammarnazi on me if I typed something wrong, english isn't my first language and I spellcheck the best I can.. )
What is company of heroes?
According to wikipedia, COH ( the shortcut for company of heroes which I will continue to use from now on ) is:
Hmk, not much there. Let's look at what the backside of the box has to say..
So it's an epic new ww2 game with graphics to drool over, this is about the same as when I first heard about this game in a pc gameplay magazine. Of course the screenshots looked amazing, the detail everywhere looked incredible and I hoped for a great experience. When the game was released, the reviews hailed it as the next coming of christ rtswise and everywhere the game was rated extremely high. If you want proof of that, have a look at this list [http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/companyofheroes?q=company%20of%20heroes]. As you can see the more well known reviewsites give the game a perfect 10-9.5 for the most part, indeed the game experience had to be mindblowing.
Once I actually played the game, not so much. All I ever read about COH is nothing but praise with stuff like: it's so innovative!, there is cover you can use!, it looks so good!, omg you can blow up buildings!, etc. Did everybody lose his mind or is everybody in the gaming community on Relic's payroll? Let's have a closer look at this now well known game.
Installing the game
The first time I put the DVD in my DVD-drive, I was of course in a hurry to get the game installed. I was itching to play, only to realize the damn installation took forever. Maybe I'm alone on this because I have a slower DVD drive or something, but seriously the installation took more then an hour! And during this installation, I could not do anything at all. The installation took so much from my PC, when I tried to alt tab to surf the web in the meantime the whole thing froze on me forcing me to reinstall all over again. A warning for people with a little older pc like mine, go and make a sandwhich or some coffee while installing cause it'l take a while.
Starting up and playing the first bit of the campaign
Once I actually got ingame, setting up my video and audio wans't hard to do. There is a testmode build in the game so you can see how your framerate is with the current graphical settings. Mind you that this testmode is for a cinematic cutscene, where as I'd much rather have a quick automated battle generated with alot of units and buildings on screen at once for a more accurate reading.
Once completed I clicked on campaign, only to find out that there is no option to play as the germans at all. What we had instead was another cookiecutter Normandy campaign for the American side, oh joy. We haven't played that one yet now have we
O well, let's play anyway to find out what this company full of heroes really is. A cinematic cutscene introduced me to Omaha beach, where an eager hardass officer runs out of the boat towards the mg42's in the bunkers like he's made of steel only to fall to the bullets in a dramatic pose. You never see the germans, just the hands reloading the machine gun. A little overly dramatic and patriotic aren't we Relic? The screen switches to an ingame view and I'm treated with some squads of soldiers that have just landed. I look around a little to see what's new in the game. Cover is represented by red, yellow or green shields ( bad, medium and good cover ) behind the beach barricades, besides that there's not much to do besides select my squads and have them run further up the beach. This first mission is made extremely easy since lost squads are replaced in a second by spawns at the water, so it's really just rush the beach with everything you have. Once an engineer squad is up to the barbed wire shingle, he blows it up in another dramatic cutscene. After this the only thing left to do is destroy or capture the 88's seen on the screenshot below.
These are pretty inaccurate against infantry apparently so this was a breeze as well. After this, another cutscene where the bunker is breached in a dramatic way by some luitenant or officer you couldn't command as an actual unit.
What was clear for me at this point was that you don't actually command a couple of units where you can get attached too. The entire name of the game is referring to a group of people you don't get to play with, the whole story is about characters you don't see in the actual gameplay. This is of course to prevent "hero X was killed, mission failed" being overly frustrating for the player, forcing them to have units that they will leave in the back of the base in fear of getting them killed. But it seems fake and forced to me.
Another thing that was pretty clear after only the first mission was it's arcadyness. I'm not asking full blown realism here, but COH is a game that takes historical accuracy and kicks it out the window sometimes. This is most likely to differentiate itself in the ww2 RTS genre, but to me because it tries so damn hard to be fun and entertaining it just falls flat on it's face on important stuff like immersion. I've played a ton of ww2 games, almost every gamer has. This results in emidiatly being able to pick out things that just aren't right. After playing and finishing the campaign I have seen:
*AT guns being positioned in a certain arc and fireing in an exreme angle all of a sudden. These things can actually home in on enemy tanks, rendering actual strategic positioning pretty useless.
*Missions where you are suppose to defend certain areas, only to have them AI shelled by invincible offmap artillery which you cannot prevent at all. Why defend these areas if there are prescripted to be destroyed anyway?
*Extremely poor AI pathfinding. Almost every vehicle will get stuck somewhere if you order it to go somewhere without babysitting it click by click. There are mods out there that fix this, but why does Relic ignore such a simple thing since day 1? Seeing 6 panther tanks, 2 tigers and god knows what else all clutterd around a single bridge kind of throws out any immersion you could have out the window.
*Homing sticky bombs, these things were barely used in the war to begin with yet it's the main antitank weapon American infantry has in COH. These actually follow the tank in question if you drive it away when it's thrown, causing you to actually see armor drive around with a glowing bomb sliding behind it. ( for balance reasons they say )
*Balance being biased purely on strategy/game purposes, instead of simple historical use. I've seen patch after patch after patch lately and none of them fix anything, they just screw things up more. Again there are mods that give good examples, but the arcadyness of it all just throws out any balance you could have to begin with. Tanks have health instead of armor, infantry can wade through mgfire because of "elite armor settings" and some can get up instantly when pinned by enemy mgfire because of a skill that says they can.
The rush towards vehicles
In case you don't know and you've never heard about COH, you need to build a few buildings in order to create units and you need to capture strategic points to get resource points just like with w40k dawn of war. Nice in theory, but you always start out at the same places on the map meaning the enemy will always know where your base is, making baserushes extremely easy sometimes if you know how. These buildings are very limited in actual use as well. Every version of COH has seen only a few builds in use online. This usually consisted of: build/tech to the building that has the cheapest best unit you can get atm, spam that unit untill you win or tech a little further.. repeat.
Spam units you say, but isn't that restricted somehow? Well if you get more units, you will get less income as a balance measure and there is also a popcap. A tiger takes up alot more popcap then a squad of infantry for instance. What this actually does for me is destroy immersion even more. You can have all the resources in the world, but because you're at some invisible population limit you can't build anything at all untill some of your units die. But this creates balance people will tell you on Relic forums! If they have a Tiger, they won't have much infantry.. which is exactly my point, why shouldn't a player with a Tiger have some infantry as well? Doesn't that create diverse and combined arms gameplay, something most people desire?
Then there is the function of commander abilities to take into account. Remember in C&C generals where your factory all of a sudden got blown up by some unstoppable artillery just because that player could click a little button, and how annoying it was to not be able to do anything about it? They implimented the exact same system in COH. Killing gives you exp, which enables more skills in the skilltree you've chosen. You're able to get free tanks, airstrikes, etc by the click of a button. These sometimes cost a little resource to use, but I personally despise anything that's click and shoot. It takes no skill at all and you cannot kill the actual artillery when it's shooting at you, eating away the fun out of the game. People will scream imbalance on the balance forums daily of course, which creates for patch after patch screwing things up even more. Free tank? Now it's useless and can't hit the broad side of a barn, have fun!
As a final thing to mention conserning vehicles, they are either very good or extremely useless. The good ones are pretty much nerved by now as well. As I mentioned earlier the pathfinding is terrible, forcing you to babysit each and every vehicle to not have it turn it's rear weak end to the enemy every single time. ( we love micro, the hardcore "pro's" will say! ). The range is pretty crappy as well, meaning tanks will actually rush into AT guns and such to be able to actually return fire to the enemy. MG's on tanks are pretty much useless and can't hit anything most of the time, where as the main guns are usually fixed somehow for balance reasons. Do you see that tank having it's turretgun pointed toward the enemy tank? It doesn't mean it will actually hit, since there is X% chance it will miss. These numbers make combat pure dumb luck ending up in mudslinging rounds back and forth and clicking wildy to try and micro your tanks out of the idiotic AI pathfinding. It's all very silly, yet nobody seems to care about this..
Multiplayer
After the poor campaign and the pretty boring skirmish games I tried ( AI seems to prefer spamming ATguns and armored cars ), I had a go at multiplayer. With the coming of the expansion Opposing Force, two sides have been added namely the British and some sort of Heavy Panzergrenadier company. Both kind of screwed over the already fragile balance in the default game, it's now even more of a mess. I can't even get in the mp game now anymore though, since my router seems to block access to other players in Relic online. This has something to do with not allowing NAT connections and having a shitty router, but yes I've tried everything.. and COH is the only game I have had this specific problem with. Even if you do not have this problem, Relic online is slow, connection types don't show properly, smurfs are everywhere ( smurfs are highranking players under lowlevel accounts ) and you have a good chance of getting a loss counted when you actually won a game or the other way around. To me it's a wonder this game has a community left at all, I guess graphics really are a winning factor these days.
The expansion further explained
Although the expansion adds some nice flavor to the game, it doesn't do anything about the core flaws the game already had. Instead it throws in a turtlerace ( the british ) in a game that's suppose to be about fast moving combat and a side with expansive ubervehicles ( Panzerelite ) when vehicles were already overly dominant in the default game. It's like adding fuel to a fire.. You cannot play Lan with friends on a single disc anymore, because you have to login to Relic online for sp and Lan as well. Relic got kind of frisky conserning pirated copies, hence the constant login measure. Not a good idea imo, since playing Lan with friends on a single DVD actually encourages people to go out and buy the game themselves if they like it.
Note that you can buy and play the expansion without owning regular COH, you won't be able to play as the factions Wehrmacht and Americans if you do though.
What is the point I'm trying to make with this review?
When you read the reviews, all they rant about is how great the coversystem is and terrifc the grahpics are. This assumption is wrong since infantry combat is pretty poor. Yes the coversystem is nice, but the implimentation of the system and it's actual use is overshadowd by certain aspects:
- You can have infantry in bad cover getting shot, with them not taking much damage at all. You can actually see infantry 2 feet away from each other, both in some sort of cover just taking potshots at each other for 2 minutes untill one unit runs out of health. It just looks extremely silly and unrealistic.
- Certain abilities render normal infantry tactics completely useless. Do you see a machine gun as the allies in a building? Just use the grenade button, it will automatically home into the window in question that you click at and will almost always kill 1,2 germans. Need some more power as the Americans? Get the BAR upgrade, in COH these weapons actually function as mini machineguns that instantly surpress people at the click of a button. Not to mention a ton of other silly upgrades, giving simple infantry superhuman abilities.
- When you do finally manage to have some nice somewhat realistic and immersive infantry battles, with infantry and some static defences and garrisoned buildings in place, it usually all goes completely out of the window when vehicles show up. Vehicles wtf kill infantry in most occassions ( unless they are rigged to suck, because they got nerved in patches like the STUGIII ) with them needing a hardcounter in order to fight back.
- The reviewers promised terrific AI, while the infantry AI is ok and the bulk of AI is extremely retarded.
*The campaign is far from epic. Instead it's done before ( enough with Normandy already! ), overly patriotic and stereotypical ( the allies die in slow motion with dramatic dialogue while the germans talk in a strange accent and constantly make fun of themselves ).
- The online lobby is very poor, with only a few maps you can actually play for a ranking.. of which even fewer maps are actually fun to play. Thus you're basically playing the same map over and over ( semois and the other one, Angol or something of the like.. )
- Effective build orders are very limited, in a proper mp game you can almost expect what type of unit the enemy will send just by knowing their faction. Alot of units are almost never used at all.
There are also some good points though, don't get me wrong. The graphics are superb as promised, the destruction you can do is nice and the game runs well on somewhat older machines but my point is this game is not deserving of it's reputation. There are better ww2 rts games out there, I ask you why is this game rated so ridiculously high everywhere? Am I really alone with my disappointment with this game? The engine is terrific and I feel they could have done so much more with this game, campaignwise and overall gameplay wise to make it an instant classic. Instead in it's current state, it's like a Ferrari that's won countless awards with being shiny, yet having an old rusty framework underneath to support it all.
Thanks for reading if you managed to go through it all. It may read off more like a rant, I just had to get it out of my system. I avoid stuff like "you can build units and buildings" in this review, since that's like saying an fps involves guns these days. Balance and gameplay are what's most important to me and they are glaringly flawed in COH.
( and don't go spellings/grammarnazi on me if I typed something wrong, english isn't my first language and I spellcheck the best I can.. )
