Company of Heroes Single Player Demo

Relic Entertainment has a long history of developing good strategy games, although most of them took place in space, or they featured aliens from distant galaxies battling each other for supremacy on strange planets. This time, though, they set their sights on producing a realistic RTS game set in the second World War and put everything they've learned along the way into a title called Company of Heroes.

The game's campaign starts off by explaining a thing or two about the Able Company, which fought all over Europe during WWII and seen more than its share of combat. In the missions that follow, you get to take control over this company and use your own tactics and strategies in order to come out victorious, by defeating the enemies that stand in your way.

Just like the Warhammer 40,000 franchise, Company of Heroes is largely based on the same principles when it comes to the core mechanics: build troops and capture interest points across the map, before your enemy does the same. Unlike in DoW, though, these strategic locations offer you manpower instead of requisition points, as well as fuel for your vehicles, depending on what type of resources you capture. Moreover, buildings can also be occupied and fortified with your infantry, to make them harder to kill and easier to defend a certain position.

As you train more and more troops, you get to unlock more powerful units, such as tanks, mortar teams or even airstrike support. The game uses a very powerful graphic engine to render the destruction caused by these machines and basically everything crumbles under the weight of a tank, whether it's rocks, people or wooden fences. Airstrikes, on the other hand, burn the ground to a crisp and demolish anything that happen to be in the way, including buildings.

These mechanics make for a very dynamic gameplay, since you can decide to play in a number of ways, both offensive and defensive. In case you want to turtle in and defend your position, there are a variety of structures that help you do that, such as machine gun nests, sand bags, barbed wire, all of which slow down the enemy and force him to retreat pretty quickly.

It is actually quite difficult to find any bad things to say about Company of Heroes, other than the fact that it may prove to be a bit too much for RTS beginners, although the tutorial can probably solve that out as well. In the end, the game truly comes through when it comes to the exceptional mechanics and the incredible visual effects.