HQ! Incoming Rant!

There have been quite a few reviews of Company of Heroes that begin their critique by ridiculing the industry for producing too many strategy games set in World War II. This kind of argument is specious because the industry produces what they believe will sell. If you’d rather see a game that depicts the invasion of Grenada, please, be my guest, I’m sure you’ll sell a few copies; with emphasis on few. There’s a reason so many police and lawyer shows fill your channel guide: people watch them. WWII has been turned into thousands of books and hundreds of movies and I see no sign of it dissipating. Perhaps what reviewers should ridicule is the quality of WWII games, which range from utter garbage to an occasional masterpiece, like Call of Duty or the Medal of Honor series.

Besides, reviewers tend to focus on a game’s setting so much because it’s their job to play as many games as they can, forgetting that the common game player isn’t out there buying every single strategy title, and as such, not sharing a feeling of inundation. Ultimately, it isn’t the setting of a game that should ever come into question, but the gameplay and innovation of the title. If there’s 750,000 WWII strategy games on the market, number 750,001 shouldn’t suffer because of what has come before, especially if it leapfrogs the competition in every respect, as is the case with Relic’s Company of Heroes.

While I couldn’t care less about a game’s location or time period, I will admit to cringing every time I see a new real-time strategy game, and yes, it’s because I’ve played every single one imaginable. Hell, I even wrote the official strategy guide for 7th Legion, easily the worst RTS ever produced and one I bet you don’t even remember. I even told Prima Publishing they had a turkey on their hands and that they’d actually save money by not wasting it on publishing the very book I was writing. They didn’t listen and the game went on to sell 400 copies. Try writing 60,000 words on game with zero strategy and see how you feel about the genre for ever more.

So when I was asked to review Company of Heroes and was told it was an RTS, I swallowed the puke that was rising in my esophagus and decided to give it a go, if for no other reason than it was created by Relic, a company I admired for giving me Homeworld, the last great attempt at producing a new kind of RTS. Glad I did, as Company of Heroes is easily the best war-based RTS ever created, and one that sets a new standard in every category of gameplay. Now I can look forward to four more years of every other competitor trying to duplicate Relic’s effort, once again driving a genre into the dirt. Yipee!

Peasants Chopping Wood

I don’t want to chop any more wood. I can’t take it anymore. If I have to tell my peasant population to mine more gold I think I’m gonna freak-out. And if I hear those peasants confirm my order with yet one more repetitive, “Yes sir!” well, I’m going hurt something…or someone, GTA style. Fortunately, Relic can be safe in the knowledge that I won’t be visiting them any time soon with homicidal intentions, as there are no peasants, no wood, no gold, no glowy-blue globs of alien oil. Instead, Company of Heroes has used the concept of resources in an interesting way, incorporating it into a control point scheme, similar to how you can takeover points in Battlefield 2, except holding said point increases the amount of production for your army, whether it be fuel for creating tanks and other vehicles or ammunition for increasing your troops, as well as upgrades for all of your units. It’s a simple process void of micromanagement and strikes right at the heart of Heroes gameplay.