Company Of Heroes - Hands On
Company of Heroes – Hands on
Right, take the guys from Relic, those wonderful chaps behind the superb Warhammer based Dawn Of War RTS, forget about fantasy universes and improbable weapons. Instead, turn all your expertise and know-how into making an RTS set in World War 2 wih a heavy influence from Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers and you get the loveliness that is Company Of Heroes.
Still in development and still with a fair whack of work to do with the resource side of things, Company of Heroes puts you in charge of either Allied or Axis forces, facing off over French soil shortly after the D-Day landings.
Control of your troops is very easy with the usual RTS standards of selecting a single unit with one click, a related group with a double click or just dragging a box around a load of guys at once. The cursor become context sensitive so you can either give orders to take up positions, attack a target or bombard etc.. all standard stuff so far.
Where Company of Heroes does deviate from the norm is in how the game actually plays and how the troops react… Without sounding overly gushing, I really think that Relic have cracked the pathfinding and dumb AI issue that has dogged the RTS genre for years.
The AI troops in Company of Heroes are well aware of how fragile their lives are and short of legging it away from battle and hiding under a blanket, they’ll try and stay alive as much as possible. Relic have worked very hard to ensure that troops from both sides react to their surroundings and the situations they’re in, with as little intervention from you as possible.
For example, I had my squad patrolling up the street, so the point man was uber-alert, signalling the others to follow if it was safe. Of course, being wary of getting a bullet through the helmet, the squad behind him were ducking into doorways, running up behind burnt out vehicles and generally playing the part of flesh and blood soldier not wanting to spring any unsightly and fatal leaks.
Suddenly, a load of jackbooted Germans came into view and there was a frantic scrabble on both sides… remember, the AI powers the enemy too. Germans were legging it back to their sandbagged machine gun nests whilst machine gunners loaded up their weapons. My guys were hurling themselves up behind cover and those stuck in the open were either sprinting for their lives towards cover of going prone and drawing a bead on the Germans… and all of this was without any intervention from me other than to tell my squad to take a walk up the road.
The quality of programming here shows through in a big way and Relic have taken the time to make sure that the game world is as realistic as possible. Sure, let your guy take cover behind that wooden cart, but don’t forget that carts aren’t any match for a couple of grenades and an MG42 chuntering away… it’ll soon be matchwood and your guy’ll be dead. That’s what happens in real life and so that’s what happens in Company of Heroes.
Built into the AI is a situational awareness not only of what mission goals are (such as trying to stop your troops), but also what is going on around them. If the enemy suddenly has a tank roll up, the troops will then let the tank go in and blow everything away, before moving up and mopping up your guys. Similarly, if a tank I blown up, it then becomes a piece of cover either side can use to their advantage. Troops can occupy houses and buildings to get cover and fire on each other from an elevated positions, even taking advantage of holes you blow in a building to give them a new line of fire if they need it. The whole idea is that everything does what you’d expect it to and everyone reacts to whats going on with a bit of common sense… and it works really, really well.
The fire suppression system is a good example. Moving my squads up a road, I was confronted by an MG42 set in the first floor window of a house. My guys scattered, took cover and started returning fire, but a stone built house is good cover and I wasn’t have much effect. I ordered the guys to give suppressing fire and although the accuracy went all to hell, the sheer number of bullets coming their way made the enemy MG team stop firing and take cover. This let me sneak a team of engineers up the side of the building to toss a satchel charge through the window. One bang later and most of the house was gone, along with all of the MG crew. Job done, and just like it was done in real life.
Relic have a spent as much time working on the environment as they have on the AI and, for the first time, we’ve got a truly destructable game world, which makes a big difference on gameplay. Worried a bazooka squad or sniper might be hiding in a house? If you’ve got one, roll up your tank and get him to blow the ground floor walls away… with enough hits the house will collapse. Found a heavily fortified enemy position with no cover in the approach? Call in an artillery strike to soften it up and leave some handy shell-holes to hide in.
And the weaponry has had loads of work on it too. Tanks are the formidable metal monsters they should be, being impervious to rifle and machine gun fire, but a strategically laid mine will blow a track off and immobilise it without too much trouble. You could pummel a Tiger tank all day with a bazooka and eventually blow it up, but get round the back where the armour is weakest and you can blow his engine out then blow him up in three or four hits.
Playing a big part in the proceedings is Relic physics implementation, which helps in the damage modelling as well as making the environment feel more realistic. The quick way to collapse a building is to blow out the ground floor walls and watch the rest come tumbling down. But it effects other objects in the game too… blowing out a nearby wall might injure your troops with flying debris just as much as lobbing a grenade into a machine gun nest will scatter bodies and sandbags all over the shop.
So with the true line of sight based combat, advanced AI survival routines, faithful weapon and vehicle modelling and all the other stuff I mentioned above, Company of Heroes is looking very, very tasty indeed… but you’re going to have to wait until next year to see for yourself.
