E3 2006: Company of Heroes first impressions

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PC: Forget the nukes; war is won one street at a time in this intense, small-scale RTS

You have to love it when the guy demoing his hot new real-time strategy game to you begins his pitch by listing off all the stuff that sucks about real-time strategy games. The battlefields are the same each time you play. Resource gathering and slowly learning new technology is boring. And most of your units, be they infantry or jet fighters, are flat-out stupid.

What's a gamer to do? Well, it looks like it might be a good idea to play Company of Heroes, a fast-paced, World War II-themed RTS that sets out to specifically correct these shortcomings.

First, let's cover that concept of the battlefields being the same each time you play. Not here. The level we saw demoed was a mid-sized French town held by the Axis powers, at least for now. The thing is, everything in the town is destructible and figures into your cover. We'll talk more about this after the battle begins in earnest; right now, we've just sent our scouts up to the town square to check things out.

Which brings us to the various unit's intelligence. The big, obvious thing is that they pay attention to their surroundings. Our scouts are hugging the walls, moving in and out of cover as real soldiers would. When they get to the town square and find it crawling with machine gun-wielding Axis, they quickly run to the shelter of parked cars, the corners of buildings, and so on.

The scouts, as it happens, aren't very good against the firepower being aimed at them, but about this time our Rangers show up, backed by a Sherman Crocodile - essentially a tank with a massive flamethrower instead of a big gun. This thins out the opposition (and looks damn good doing it), but doesn't quite overcome the machine-gun nest in the upper floor of one of the buildings. As it happens, you can tell your troops to garrison themselves in buildings, and they'll take up the best firing positions - smart.

Eric Bratcher
Eric Bratcher
I was the founding Executive Editor/Editor in Chief here at GR, charged with making sure we published great stories every day without burning down the building or getting sued. Which isn't nearly as easy as you might imagine. I don't work for GR any longer, but I still come here - why wouldn't I? It's awesome. I'm a fairly average person who has nursed an above average love of video games since I first played Pong just over 30 years ago. I entered the games journalism world as a freelancer and have since been on staff at the magazines Next Generation and PSM before coming over to GamesRadar. Outside of gaming, I also love music (especially classic metal and hard rock), my lovely wife, my pet pig Bacon, Japanese monster movies, and my dented, now dearly departed '89 Ranger pickup truck. I pray sincerely. I cheer for the Bears, Bulls, and White Sox. And behind Tyler Nagata, I am probably the GR staffer least likely to get arrested... again.