TerranUp16
New Member
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Don't ask me why I made the description sound like an advertisement, lol.
Anyway, I FINALLY got my hands on the Company of Heroes open beta. I've been waiting a long, LONG time for this. For those who don't know, Company of Heroes is a World War II RTS game, however, it's not your average WWII RTS game. In CoH, the focus is placed more on tactics. You get resources from holding areas of the map, and you must ensure that your areas touch so that there is a path back to your original base, otherwise those points will be considered "out of supply" and you won't receive resources from them. Basically, it's frontline combat. Relic brings back squads, though being in a squad means a lot more now. Your guys are very intelligent, and will actually take cover from enemy fire without any commands from the player (though, you can command them to yourself if you want). Projectiles are all rendered in real-time (just like in an FPS game), so they will hit what they hit, instead of hitting nothing when they miss. Everything is destructible, and it is a much more realistic battlefield. Artillery will actually create craters, and infantry can actually take cover in the craters. All-around, the systems are realistic. For example, most of the time you'll want to attack tanks from behind, for their front armor is nearly impenetrable.
So, I finally got the play the beta. CoH is everything that Relic promised, and more. The coding is extremely efficient, and thus, though the graphics are almost as good as modern FPS games, you won't need a monster computer to crank the gfx up to full. I was actually able to get everything on full with my 1.5 year old AMD 64 3500+, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and 2 gig RAM computer (yes, that is fairly good, however, it's nothing compared to some more modern computers, and I had only expected to play CoH with this rig on somewhere between Med and High). The controls are quick, innovative, and well-placed for the most part. The game really does a great job of capturing the feel of real war. Oftentimes when enemies are killed, they fall to the ground and wriggle around for a bit, clutching at their stomaches as they deal with their fatal injury. It's things like this that add to the immersion factor. The game is definitely almost all tactics, but it's not overwhelming. At points people would complain about DoW being a bit overwhelming to keep the proper control of all of a player's units, but CoH has fixed that issue entirely. As I'd said earlier, it's a game of tactics, and tactics are abundant in this game. It sticks very close to an almost real-world simulation in some aspects, so it's nice in that all of the tactics generally make sense. Enemy set up a machine gun nest where your guys intend to walk? Send a team around out of its line of fire and chuck a grenade in to take it out. Enemies holed up in a building? Use cover to inch your way forward and drop some satchel charges on them. There are plenty of ways to exploit the upper hand, but being in the position of having the upper hand is a very fragile position, as there is a very effective counter to everything.
My one beef at the moment is that the online service has a fair amount of errors, and I've yet to be able to play an online game. The online service that Relic is using for CoH is all-new, so it is expected that there are bugs ahoy, but this is still beta and I'm confident Relic will rectify these before release.
Overall, Company of Heroes looks to be a downright amazing RTS game, and it's assuredly pushing the genre forward to places it's never gone before. I'd certainly use the term revolutionary when describing this game. There really is nothing else that even comes close to the tactical depth of Company of Heroes, and the Essence Engine seems to be absolutely unbeatable at the moment, providing amazing graphics, fully destructible environments, and jaw-dropping AI, all with efficient code that doesn't lag. I highly recommend this game to just about anyone. The fast-paced, frontline, tactical basis of the game should appeal to players of all types. It provides enough depth to satisfy even the most hardcore RTS gamers, and yet it still manages to offer a simple, logical, and visceral experience that should appeal to FPS players. This is, without a doubt, my current pick for Game of the Year, especially since Quake Wars: Enemy Territory got pushed back until 2007.
<div align="center"><img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/207/reviews/927618_20060727_screen001.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/179/reviews/927618_20060629_screen001.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/179/reviews/927618_20060629_screen003.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
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<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/116/reviews/927618_20060427_screen004.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/345/reviews/927618_20051212_screen002.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
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Don't ask me why I made the description sound like an advertisement, lol.
Anyway, I FINALLY got my hands on the Company of Heroes open beta. I've been waiting a long, LONG time for this. For those who don't know, Company of Heroes is a World War II RTS game, however, it's not your average WWII RTS game. In CoH, the focus is placed more on tactics. You get resources from holding areas of the map, and you must ensure that your areas touch so that there is a path back to your original base, otherwise those points will be considered "out of supply" and you won't receive resources from them. Basically, it's frontline combat. Relic brings back squads, though being in a squad means a lot more now. Your guys are very intelligent, and will actually take cover from enemy fire without any commands from the player (though, you can command them to yourself if you want). Projectiles are all rendered in real-time (just like in an FPS game), so they will hit what they hit, instead of hitting nothing when they miss. Everything is destructible, and it is a much more realistic battlefield. Artillery will actually create craters, and infantry can actually take cover in the craters. All-around, the systems are realistic. For example, most of the time you'll want to attack tanks from behind, for their front armor is nearly impenetrable.
So, I finally got the play the beta. CoH is everything that Relic promised, and more. The coding is extremely efficient, and thus, though the graphics are almost as good as modern FPS games, you won't need a monster computer to crank the gfx up to full. I was actually able to get everything on full with my 1.5 year old AMD 64 3500+, GeForce 6800 Ultra, and 2 gig RAM computer (yes, that is fairly good, however, it's nothing compared to some more modern computers, and I had only expected to play CoH with this rig on somewhere between Med and High). The controls are quick, innovative, and well-placed for the most part. The game really does a great job of capturing the feel of real war. Oftentimes when enemies are killed, they fall to the ground and wriggle around for a bit, clutching at their stomaches as they deal with their fatal injury. It's things like this that add to the immersion factor. The game is definitely almost all tactics, but it's not overwhelming. At points people would complain about DoW being a bit overwhelming to keep the proper control of all of a player's units, but CoH has fixed that issue entirely. As I'd said earlier, it's a game of tactics, and tactics are abundant in this game. It sticks very close to an almost real-world simulation in some aspects, so it's nice in that all of the tactics generally make sense. Enemy set up a machine gun nest where your guys intend to walk? Send a team around out of its line of fire and chuck a grenade in to take it out. Enemies holed up in a building? Use cover to inch your way forward and drop some satchel charges on them. There are plenty of ways to exploit the upper hand, but being in the position of having the upper hand is a very fragile position, as there is a very effective counter to everything.
My one beef at the moment is that the online service has a fair amount of errors, and I've yet to be able to play an online game. The online service that Relic is using for CoH is all-new, so it is expected that there are bugs ahoy, but this is still beta and I'm confident Relic will rectify these before release.
Overall, Company of Heroes looks to be a downright amazing RTS game, and it's assuredly pushing the genre forward to places it's never gone before. I'd certainly use the term revolutionary when describing this game. There really is nothing else that even comes close to the tactical depth of Company of Heroes, and the Essence Engine seems to be absolutely unbeatable at the moment, providing amazing graphics, fully destructible environments, and jaw-dropping AI, all with efficient code that doesn't lag. I highly recommend this game to just about anyone. The fast-paced, frontline, tactical basis of the game should appeal to players of all types. It provides enough depth to satisfy even the most hardcore RTS gamers, and yet it still manages to offer a simple, logical, and visceral experience that should appeal to FPS players. This is, without a doubt, my current pick for Game of the Year, especially since Quake Wars: Enemy Territory got pushed back until 2007.
<div align="center"><img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/207/reviews/927618_20060727_screen001.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/179/reviews/927618_20060629_screen001.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/179/reviews/927618_20060629_screen003.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/124/reviews/927618_20060505_screen007.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2006/116/reviews/927618_20060427_screen004.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
<img width=\"501\" class=\"attach\" src=\"http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2005/345/reviews/927618_20051212_screen002.jpg\" border='0' alt=\"IPB Image\" />
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