Alan’s Blog

Played the Company of Heroes demo the other day. Wow pretty much sums it up. I’m not really a huge RTS fan, I’ve always liked them because they usually included a multiplayer skirmish mode against the AI, but Company of Heroes is amazing. This game is much like the Rainbow Six of RTS games.

The AI is tricky, but what struck me more was the AI controlling your squad movement. In CoH you don’t control individual units (human units anyway) but a squad As your squads advance a point, they make use of natural cover. It adds a whole new level of realism when you can watch units which you gave broad orders traverse intelligently towards their destination.

I haven’t played it enough yet to know if some of the old ‘gotchas’ of RTS games exist, for example, your units having unparalleled knowledge of a battlefield and running half way around the map simply to get down a cliff which looks impossible to get down based on your current information.

The grouping system is excellent. In traditional RTS games, you group units by selecting each unit or dragging a box around them. Once the units are grouped, you can usually assign a number to this group so you can refer to them later. I do not know if CoH has such a feature. I don’t know, because I haven’t needed it. In CoH you group in much the same way, drag a box around a number of units/squads. The difference lies in the fact groups are persistent in that you issue orders to individual squads within that group, and then jump back to every squad in the group to issue generic orders. In larger battles, you may still need to assign group numbers. But I haven’t found the need yet.

Visually, the game looks great. No complaints there. Its one of the few RTS games that is done in 3d and still manages to make units easy to see. I have found in some previous titles, the units just blended into the scenery too much. The level of destruction available in the environment is very nice. Watching tanks crash through brick walls is quite satisfying. The ‘Squad Cover’ interface is nice and easy to use. Every location you can move to will have a series of dots on the ground denoting where you squad members will end up. You are told whether the location affords no cover (red), light cover, medium cover (orange) or heavy cover (green). This allows you to make decisions of the destination of your troops quickly.

Resource management seems to be less of priority compared to good tactics. Hopefully that will make multiplayer games less of a “rush to amass resources, build a huge army and win” and more interesting with smaller battles happening more often. The fact that you have a retreat option also gives me hope.

The game hits stores on Friday 29th here and it looks as though it’s one to pick up. Hopefully it will tie me over until Supreme Commander is released

I seem to recall saying I would endeavour to update this more often. Currently I’m probably going to have to go with once a month. Things are happening. Quite a few things. But it’s all work related, and I can’t talk about it.

Things I can talk about:

• I finally watched the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns. A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Really enjoyed them. I had heard a lot of people say the last one was the best, but personally I enjoyed the first two a bit more. Overall though, they lived up to everything I’d heard and a lot more. Highly recommended.
• I picked up the PopCap Collection off Steam. I’d played a few of the trial versions before and had spent far too much time in the past playing the online free versions. My favourites are still AstroPop, Bookworm and Zuma - however some of the others seem like they could grow on me. Paul has been playing a lot of Talismania, which seems pretty cool.
• Also on Steam, I picked up the Uplink/Darwinia pack. I haven’t had a chance to really get into Darwinia yet, but I played the crap out of the Uplink Demo back in the day. If you haven’t played Uplink, you should. It’s pure awesomeness. Also looking forward to Defcon, which is coming out soon (this month apparently). It looks exactly like Global Thermonuclear War from Wargames, which is awesome.
• Played a bit of ShadowGrounds as well, which seems like a lot of fun. Was hoping for LAN co-op rather than same screen co-op. But oh well, any co-op is good co-op.

I might update some more a bit later, but I need to head out for lunch now.

Update

On the Xbox side:

• I’ve been playing Lego Star Wars (2 player). That game is too much fun. We’ve finished the story and are currently going back through again to get all the Mini Kit and Super Kit pieces.
• We’ve also been playing Hunter: The Reckoning (3 player), which is a blast. It’s getting a touch frustrating due to the difficulty level, I’m thinking the balancing isn’t quite right with 3 players in the game (either that, or we just suck ). Regardless, it’s been fun. We’ve got Hunter: The Reckoning - Redeemer on the horizon too, which we might try out just to see if it’s better balanced.

That’s it for now.