Puck’s Blog

I’ve been ranting a bit lately, it’s time for a positive post!  I picked up Company of Heroes by Relic Entertainment a few weeks back, and the game is amazing.  It’s a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game set in World War II and the game isn’t just gorgeous – the gameplay is a breath of fresh air in the RTS genre.

In addition, and after several rants here I can’t stress how cool this is, the game doesn’t require me to have my DVD copy in my drive when playing.  Guys, you pretty much guaranteed that I’d buy Company of Heroes II because you decided to treat me, the legitimate purchaser, with respect.

But back to the game!  The Wiki page I linked earlier has more info on it, as well as screenshots showing off just how beautiful it is.  What will really blow you away is that the cutscenes are shown using the exact same graphical engine that the game is played in.  This allows for some seamless cutscene-to-instantly-playing moves that made me go “Oh man, wow!”

And it seems everyone agrees with me that this game is greatness:

As of 10/4/2006, all critic reviews were positive [1].

PC Gamer UK awarded Company of Heroes 94%, the highest they have given an RTS, they also gave it a ‘Must Buy’ tag ^{[citation needed]}. PC Gamer US gave CoH a 96% as well as an Editors Choice Award ^{[citation needed]}.

PC Zone in the UK awarded Company of Heroes 93% in Issue 173 meaning it was awarded with a Classic award

Edge, a UK publication, awarded Company of Heroes a score of 9 (out of 10) in Issue 167.

Metacritic Review average of 94, Gaining Universal Acclaim

Online, Company of Heroes has received a score of 9.0 from GameSpot[2] (original score was an 8.9, revised because 1.2 Patch fixed SLI problem^[1]), a 9.4 from IGN[3], 5 out of 5 stars from GameSpy[4], 10/10 from Eurogamer[5], a 10 out of 10 from 1up[6] and a 9.2 from Gamernode[7].

If you at all enjoy RTS games, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up.  It’s beautiful, fun, engaging, and isn’t kicking you in the balls with terrible copy protection schemes.