Product Details
 | Company of Heroes: Gold Edition |
| Price: | $53.98 |
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Product Description
You're in the middle of World War II and you must lead the British 2nd Army to liberate Caen France. Or command the German Panzer Elite as they struggle to repel the largest airborne invasion in history. Play alone or with friends online in four playable armies. Realistic effects like Dynamic Weather Effects and AI and physics enhancements make this the most exciting RTS game ever. Format: WIN XPVISTA Genre: ENTERTAINMENT Rating: M UPC: 752919493359 Manufacturer No: 49335Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #4888 in Video Games
- Brand: THQ
- Model: 49335
- Released on: 2008-03-05
- ESRB Rating: Mature
- Platform: Windows
- Format: DVD-ROM
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.25" h x 5.50" w x 7.50" l, .50 pounds
Features
- Contains Company of Heroes and the expansion Company of Heroes - Opposing FrontsCompany of Heroes features -
- Graphics quality and a physics driven world that is unprecedented in an RTS
- Real-time physics and a completely destructible environment guarantee no two battles ever play out in the same way. Destroy anything and re-shape the battlefield. Use buildings and terrain to your advantage, or deny them to the enemy
- Advanced squad AI brings your soldiers to life as they interact with their changing environment, take cover, and execute advanced squad tactics
- 2-8 players MP competition via LAN or InternetOpposing Fronts features -
Customer Reviews
Excellent RTS.
The number of games set
during the Second World War borders on the ridiculous. The number of
titles which attempt (usually badly) to recreate D-Day or Operation
Market Garden is vast, but the overwhelming majority of them fail to
capture either the atmosphere or historical feel of the conflict.
First-person shooters like the Call of Duty franchise have proven a lot
more successful at depicting the conflict than strategy games, with most
WWII strategy games being quite boring (such as the Sudden Strike
series, which is so anal your soldiers can actually run out of bullets,
which is taking pedantry to a new level).
For these reasons, when
Company of Heroes was first announced there wasn't a huge amount of
excitement about it, especially as the developers, Relic, were
responsible for the entertaining-but-lightweight Dawn of War series.
When it came out, however, it was an absolute revelation, doing for WWII
strategy games what Medal of Honour did for WWII shooters a decade
earlier.
Company of Heroes is set purely on the Western Front of
the European theatre of WWII, starting on D-Day and proceeding through
to the end of Operation Market Garden. The initial game features a
single campaign focusing on the US forces and depicts the assault on the
beaches, the behind-the-lines movements of special forces which
silenced the German's artillery pounding the beaches, the assault on
Cherbourg and the battles of St. Lo and Falaise that resulted in the
final defeat of German forces on the Cotentin Peninsula. The expansion,
Opposing Fronts (which is included with the CoH Gold Edition), features
two campaigns. The first centres on the German Panzer Elite as they race
to defeat the Allies' assault on Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, and
the second (set some months earlier) focuses on the British assault on
Caen, a gruelling battle that was supposed to be won in a single day but
instead lasted more than a month due to the unexpected presence of
elite SS forces in the town. A notable lack in the game is that the
fourth side, the 'normal' German Wehrmacht, lacks a single-player
campaign, but Relic have surprisingly noticed this and decided to remedy
this with a downloadable German campaign, to be released in early 2009,
although it will use different mechanics to the rest of the game.
The
game is notable for minimising base-building, although it doesn't
eliminate it as the Ground Control series did some years earlier.
However, resource-gathering has been eliminated in favour of holding
territory on the map. This mechanic encourages aggressive play from the
start, as he who seizes the most territory in the shortest possible time
will find the balance of power swinging in their favour. This leads to
an interesting trade-off as players must decide to reinforce earlier in
the game with lots of low-level units such as jeeps, mortars and machine
gun teams, or instead holding off until more advanced technology such
as artillery and tanks becomes available. The variation in these
mechanics is what makes the game interesting to play, particularly in
the compelling multiplayer modes.
On the single-player front, the
game is unfortunately rather cliched. Some of the maps are excellently
designed, but the stories are rather traditional WWII stuff featuring
good old American boys and stiff-upper-lipped British soldiers facing
off against the ruthless-but-with-a-sense-of-honour Germans (as usual
for a game, the actual Nazis play no role in events). The storytelling
is also weak, as it happens entirely within the cut scenes between
missions. The actual characters do not appear in the missions and no
storytelling takes place during the missions themselves, which means
that after spending an hour on a tough map you've forgotten what is
going on in the story, and don't particularly care about what is
happening to these cliched characters.
The American and Wehrmacht
forces are excellently-designed and balanced against one another,
although the higher-level German units (particularly their tanks) are
tough to stop once they get rolling. The game engine delivers the chaos
of battle particularly well, with massive artillery bombardments, air
strikes and ferocious tank duels giving us some of the most convincing
WWII action in a game seen to date. However, the newer sides of the
British and Panzer Elite are less interesting and, although
well-balanced against one another (the British focus on static defence
whilst the Panzer Elite are focused on attack) feel a bit off when
fighting the established sides. In particular, the American and German
ability to lock down and defend territory markers whilst the Brits and
Panzer Elite cannot is rather unbalancing.
Where Company of
Heroes comes to life is the excellent multiplayer which, after two
years, seems to have finally gotten some stable and reliable servers.
Cracking a particularly tough co-op skirmish or fighting a challenging
battle with human players is tremendously satisfying, and the varied
tactics and relatively fast pace of the game make Company of Heroes the
most satisfying multiplayer RTS game since the venerable StarCraft.
Company
of Heroes (****½) is a compelling and fun game where the single-player
experience suffers slightly but the multiplayer and skirmish games more
than make up for it. The game is available now in the UK and USA in a
'gold edition' with its expansion, Opposing Fronts, included. A second
expansion, Tales of Valour, will be released in the spring of 2009 and
Relic are considering a sequel, possibly adding the Russians or being
set in North Africa.
Enabling DMA on
your DVD drive fixes the 10104 error
I just bought the game Monday
and ran into the same error as D. Freysinger. After installation, the
game asks to download and install a 40MB patch. The game out of the box
is version 2.202. During installation of the patch, it crashes saying
that there is a problem with WW2Art.sga and error code 10104.
I
spent all night long digging through the internet looking for a
solution. It seems that there are tons of people on the Relic forums
having this same patch problem.
As far as the Gold edition, it
turns out that you need to enable DMA on your DVD drive. I had it on
PIO. WinXP automatically downgrades to PIO and locks it if it encounters
a certain number of errors on your drive.
In order for me to
enable DMA again, I had select "DMA if available" on my Primary IDE
Channel in Device Manager. However, it was still locked in PIO mode so I
also had to uninstall and let WinXP reinstall the Primary IDE Channel.
Ultra DMA was now enabled.
I reinstalled the game and not only
did it take half the time to install, but both patches (the 40MB and the
70MB) worked.
So if you're running into the same problem I have,
try enabling DMA. I don't know why it makes a difference but it does.
Somehow, having your DVD drive in PIO corrupts some of the data files
during installation.
One of the best
RTSes in years.
Company of Heroes makes sure
that you always have something to do, and that you're always focused on
taking and holding map nodes. Positioning and cover are very important
as well, so matches end up becoming contests for defensible buildings or
fortifications around resource nodes. But even as powerful as cover is,
there are plenty of tools to flush your enemies out of their
fortifications, from mortar teams to flamethrowers to artillery strikes.
It creates a very fast, very focused dynamic which is unlike any other
game I've played.
Regarding people's objections to the forced
online connection: yes, it is somewhat onerous for those who do not plan
to play online. However, the things the game forces you to do (make an
account and download patches) are what you would have to do to play
online anyway... and you really will want to play online. The campaign
is good, but the game becomes orders of magnitude deeper when played
against other humans.
I very highly recommend this game to any
RTS fan.
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