Last year, after realizing that RTS gamers purchase first person shooter games and usually use high-end graphics cards, developers started to create graphics systems for their RTS games that would bring a new level of eye candy to strategy titles. The first major efforts, Age of Empires III and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II were great first attempts at showcasing visual quality that was on par with their first-person shooter cousins.

While the ads for Company of Heroes make the game appear as an FPS, it feels a great deal like the early beginnings of the classic strategy series Close Combat. The game is relatively simple to play and follows the recent leap away from resource mining in place of capturing strategic points on a map that have ammo or fuel. There's still a fair amount of managing (the resources for creating soldiers, barracks, weapon depots, vehicles, developing better armaments and the like) but most of the mindless tasks are relegated to the engineers. Thankfully, the three types of infantry perform basic engineering tasks like creating walls of sandbags, laying down mines, tank traps, and setting up barbed wire and observation towers. And if the engineers take too long to upgrade things like machine guns, mortars, and guns, allied soldiers can acquire those heavy items after destroying an enemy unit. This helps to make them quite versatile. Other units such as snipers and mortar units don't feel as versatile and are often more likely to not use their AI to fight back effectively (thus needing addition troop support)

Destruction in Company of Heroes is a beautiful thing. Buildings take multiple satchel charge strikes to take down and watching parts of them topple through the air is really satisfying. Each of the units react to being shot at and readily return fire. While you still control their goals and focus their fire, managing each unit's wellbeing isn't always an issue. They'll still die though, and during testing, we don't remember any one unit auto-retreating after most of its unit was eliminated.

The campaign mode of the game begins with the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach. Reminiscent of the first Medal of Honor, Company of Heroes captures the horrors of the early days of World War II. Taking the beach this time requires a rough strategy, as 25 soldiers take the beachhead. Even RTS players will find the level challenging and with so many WWII games on the market, the heightened design detail in the first level sets the tone for the rest of the campaign mode.

Video segments help capture short tidbits of soldier life during the Allied push through France, and thankfully, they're short for the most part. Even better are the relatively short intel reports that detail the mission ahead. This is something that FPS developers need to remember for future efforts.

Those looking for a quick fix will find 15 levels in Skirmish mode where players can challenge CPU-controlled units or ally with a CPU unit for bigger battles. The AI really shines, as CPU-controlled units battle one another and take down your units. With four levels of difficulty, players can easily sandbox new strategies to play even better (or take on others over multiplayer mode)

Playing Company of Heroes is a fairly straightforward point-and-click affair with a relatively uncluttered HUD design that makes it easy to gain information about the status of your units. And in cases where you're not sure what something does, the game has a way of highlighting certain items in the interface as they're needed.

All in all, Company of Heroes has few faults. While we'd like more advanced options for graphics settings-a slider that better controlled how quickly the map scrolls and maybe two additional zoom out levels-Company of Heroes is a well-rounded RTS effort that mainstream RTS gamers and hardcore RTS fans will enjoy.

Our Final ScoreExcellent

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