my company of heroes gold edition review

A few people have been showing interest in CoH lately so I thought I might write up yet another review for you all.



Company of Heroes is by far my favorite RTS game so this review will be a little bias.

I originally brought company of heroes gold edition which also includes the first expansion opposing fronts since that time I have also brought Tales of Valor which is a standalone edition to the company of heroes series.



CoH is a real time strategy game that focuses around events of World War 2 and is brought to us by relic entertainment and THQ, it uses the Essence Engine and has fantastic graphics including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects, and it also makes great use of the Havok physics engine giving realistic and sometime mind blowing visual effects, including completed destructible surroundings, yes thats right, buildings, fences, bridges, every thing can be destroyed in this game.





The game has a fantastic single player campaign, skirmish mode and of course LAN and Multiplayer game options.

The single player campaign focuses on battles of World War 2 and specifically puts the player directly in some of the major operations during the Battle of Normandy where you play as Allies represented as the Americans, or the Axis which are represented as the German Wehrmacht the missions get harder and harder and are all and all great fun to play in gradually introducing you to the different aspects of the game play.

If you have the gold pack it also adds the British and German Panzer elite campaigns as well, which do a similar thing in introducing you to and increasing the difficulty level of each mission, each fraction has its specific strengths and weaknesses making for varied and complex missions.

Skirmish mode allows you to play any of the maps that are available which vary in sizes and can be played anywhere from 1 vs 1 up to 4 vs 4 the same also applies for online multiplayer or Lan matches as well.



In these modes you can have either friends as team mates or enemies or simply play against the computer where you can choice the difficulty settings and of course which units you would like to play with, or of course if you are playing on,ine there are plenty of options available to you and the CoH online community is very active.

The computer AI is quite good and on expert settings will challenge you throughout the match, the AI do tend to spam units and sometimes when on the same team as you they will not react or build a massive attacking unit and then just sit there, but generally the AI are reasonable and I’ve noticed an improvement since installing the tales of Valor expansion.

The game play varies from a lot of other RTS in that rather than focusing on a base/unit building strategy one must instead capture and manage resource points which make the game a lot more fast paced with many different things going on at any given time throughout the game.

the three different resources available are manpower, munitions, and fuel. Manpower is necessary to produce all units. Munitions allow players to upgrade individual squads or vehicles and use special abilities. Fuel allows players to purchase tanks and other vehicles, build base buildings and acquire global upgrades.

After starting the game one gets to choice a specific faction that can be specialized in for example if choosing the allies you can choose either:
• Infantry Company: Centered on defense and infantry support, this doctrine allows players to train infantry and build defenses faster, employ heavy artillery, and call in reinforcements such as the powerful US Army Rangers, or a randomized group of units with the "Battalion Reinforcement"
• Airborne Company: Centered on paratroopers and air support, this doctrine allows players to deploy paratroopers, call in recon planes, and enjoy the destructive capabilities of the P47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber.
• Armor Company: Centered on vehicles and armor support, this doctrine is slow to gain, but boast powerful abilities, such as improved vehicle production, and offering up some awesome heavy tank units.



Each have their own specific faction and one must vary what they choose depending on the map. battles can be intense and if it is a map with bridges you may find your self defending these spots from the enemy until you can gain the resources to mount attacks, i have found myself at times reduced to a handfull of units but being able to hold the bridge and slowly rebuild to the point where i can start to make in-roads against the enemy.

you are rewarded for flanking and it is especially effective against heavy vehicles and emplacements.



There are two modes of victory decided when making the game either Victory point control where one has several victory points around the middle of the map. These victory points can be captured similarly to strategic points. When one side has more victory points under their control than another, the other side's "points" start to decrease. When one side runs out of points, they lose. Alternatively, the player can simply destroy all enemy structures to win the game. Before the start of the game, the host can choose between 250, 500, or 1000 points or Annihilation where simply one has to destroy the opposition buildings.

The amounts of units available are reasonable but not excessive and there are wide arrays of different strategies one can take to attack or support any given game. Units include snipers, heavy machine gunners, AT rangers, airborne etc as well as many different light and heavy vehicles.



Tales of Valor adds three new short campaigns and some extra units as well as some added maps, if you can pick it up cheap it might be worth a look but I don’t think it’s worth the price of a full game at this point, ive had a wee look at the single player campaigns and they are focused on smaller units that are more powerful and if it wasnt for the short length of the campaigns could imagine one really knitting with the units, feeling for the situation and taking care of each unit.

CoH has a reasonably steep learning curve due to its different approach to the management of the map and the resource points but it great fun and highly strategic in its game play.

I give this game a awesome 9/10 and recommend it to RTS fans and newbie’s alike.

Minimum specs: windows Xp or Vista, Processor: 2.ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent or AMD Athlon XP or equivalent, SSE capable processor required, GPU: DirectX 9.0c compatible 64mb video card with pixel shader 1.1 support or higher with latest drivers, Hard drive: 9gb uncompressed free, Ram: 512mb or 1gb for vista

Recommended specs: Processor: 3.ghz Intel Pentium IV or equivalent, GPU: 256mb nVidia Geforce 6800 series or better, Ram: 1gb or higher, Multiplayer: 1gb ram required for multiplayer and skirmish, I set of discs per computer, internet, LAN and broadband required for online play, please have latest drivers.

I play the game on the notebook in my sig and have everything on mostly high with a few set to ultra and get very stable fps of 45+.

Enough cant be said about this game and its impossible to mention it all in a short review like this, I was only intending to give people who don’t know about this game a taste of what this game has to offer and hope I have achieved this to some degree.

Anyway if people have any question feel free to ask I’m sure there’s a lot of members that play this game, sorry if the review wasn’t up to scratch.

 

You can't max this game on a GTX 260M??? I can play on High Settings on my Mobility X700, a GTX 260M is probably 1000 times more powerful than my card.You should easily be able to max this game.

 

You can "play" on high settings... for me "playing" means NEVER going below 25-30 FPS. You are not doing that with an X700

A 260 should fair pretty well.. my 4650 can easily play on high settings in DX9, but lags a bit in DX10.

My advice in CoH is to turn tree detail down, it REALLY eats up GPU resources.

BTW I'm level 8 with all 4 factions and still play regularly. If you're ever looking for a friendly game, PM me.

 

oh yes i can max this game but it isnt very nice when the fps drop below 20, this way i have everything running really smooth and dont experience drops in fps below 35 which is how i like it, its pointless maxing a game and then having slow down because of it, the game looks fantastic and on the performance test i get a great rating but when i max it i only get average.

 

FYI, the game is still playable below 25 fps.On testing I get about 54.2 fps max, ~23 fps average, 12 fps minimum(in-game performace test), the minimum probably with heavy effects on the screen.So

And if I can play an online match on high settings(you know how people are about lagging) then I think I'm doing fine....the latest patch seems to have helped with performance to some extent, as well.Now I turned off some of the extra un needed fluff, it was pretty much sooth the whole game.The X700 still kicks.

Anyway....

 

Yea I had X700 in my acer too, it does kick even today, unless the game requires shader model 3.0 or higher.....

 

Shader model 3.0 is the reason I can't get Dawn of War II, they want Shader model 3.0 minimum.Other than that, I would probably rape Dawn of War II on Medium settings with a few options set to high.

 

absolutely not, sorry to thread hijack, but if you do low settings smoothly I would be surprised, min requirements for the CPU is a 3.2Ghz P4 or any dual core.

My old laptop with a Core2 P7350, and a high-end 9700m GTS, could run it on high, not maxed, at 1440x900 and it lagged bit. It may be the same engine, but its been HIGHLY modified.

Back on-topic, good, basic review, this is what people buying this game should read.

 

It's the shader model 3.0.CoH is Shader model 2.0, 3.0 is probably more intensive than 2.0.I bet if CoH used 3.0 it would perform just as badly.

 

updated, with alittle more info.

 

The X700 cards were very interesting, they were introduced into laptops in times when S.M 2.0 and S.M 3.0 were "at battle" and there still wasn't total nod towards S.M 3.0 for being the "better" one, I remember for example that AoE III looked better on S.M 2.0 and ran much better, where as S.M 3.0 cards were giving some rare graphical issues an hit the performance.
But then the S.M 3.0 era came when BioShock showed up and people with most powerful X-series cards - the X800's were complaining, that spite they have a high end goodcard, they can't play the game.

As for the CoH Gold - I got it few days ago in a box and damn people playing online are such a rushers....first game I played.... - 3 guys at my base durning the first 4 minutes of the game lol, when my other 2 teammates were at the other corner of the map.

 

^^ when i first started playing online i played alot of team vs computer matches, it allows one to get a feel for the game and you can control the difficulty alittle bit, or just play some skirmishes and increase the difficulty settings as you improve, first try say two normal, then one normal one hard on progress like this, its very engaging once you get a feel for the differnt units and of course which fraction works best in what situation.
Goodluck

 

heres some benchmarks of the game using the following machine.

Intel Core 2 Duo P9700 @ 2.8 GHz (25W)
nVidia GTX 260m with 1024MB DDR3
15.4" 1680x1050 Glossy Widescreen
320GB 7200RPM Seagate Momentus Hard Drive
4GB DDR3 RAM
DVD+/-RW
Windows vista home premium 64 sp2
Drivers are nVidia 186.81 WHQL.
3dmark06 10432

so heres a bench mark from company of heroes i used the performance test that is supplied with the game, i ran the benchmark all on high settings with AA off ( i usually have it on x4) and at 1680x1050 & 1280x800 screen resolutions.
heres the results:

1680x1050



Min: 27.8 Max: 146.7 Avg: 63.6



1280x800



Min:40.5 Max: 223.5 Avg: 139.2

 

Nice review and benchmark's mate. I love this game. Look's so good to.

 

I looks fantastic its amazing how much effort went into detail, i love to voice overs as well, its actually very hard to find fault with the game.

 

Werrrreee ready to push back the yankes !

 

It really is, the voice's are excellent! The graphics are literally amazing, everytime I play it I am blown away. Also it is very well optimized for a variety of systems.