The British (and Panzer Elite) are coming. To Company of Heroes, that is.
One of the most exciting real time strategy games of the last five years just got bigger. In fact, it pretty much got twice as big. The Opposing Fronts follow-up to Company of Heroes adds two entirely new playable sides, and a pair of new campaigns that add up to being easily longer than the original game's campaign.
The new Germans are the Panzer Elite, who, ironically, are better equipped with halftracks than panzers. They take a Swiss Army knife approach. There are over a dozen different "tools" in the forum of upgrades and unlockable units; you have to decide which ones to unfold. Each of their five different buildings has its own units and techs, and in many games you won't bother to build them all. Among the Panzer Elite tools are some new underhanded tricks, like leeching resources from an enemy territory, sabotaging capture points, and planting booby traps.
The British, on the other hand, are a compact side. They have only three mobile trucks that can unpack into separate field headquarters. To complement these roving installations, they can build numerous defensive emplacements. Their side puts a premium on leadership, whether it's attaching officers to infantry or adding a command tank to their armored vehicles. This side is also the most entertaining for plucky Britishisms such as "wankers" and "Bob's your uncle" (Company of Heroes continues to have some of the best sound design of any real time strategy game, and not just for its booms and bangs).
Each side has a full tree of commander powers, letting you further customize how you play. The British artillery tree, for instance, is one of the best ways to litter the map with indiscriminate destruction. The Panzer Elite Luftwaffe tree introduces their Fallschirmjager paratroopers and tactical air support, something only the Allies enjoyed before Opposing Fronts. Both sides make use of new rules for "buffing" units, improving their performance by keeping them near a particular building or unit. More than ever, Company of Heroes is one of the most tactically intense and flexible real time strategy games you can play.
Unlike the original game, Opposing Fronts gives each side its own unique campaign. The missions are not only challenging and spectacular, but they're fun to replay to try to earn medals. They're flexible enough that losing isn't a matter of trying the same thing a second time and hoping to do better. Instead, you can completely revise your approach. The campaigns are also very well written, with excellent cutscenes and dialogue. If any developer appreciates the finer points of a good war movie, it's Relic.
Opposing Fronts isn't quite an expansion pack, because it contains the entirety of the original Company of Heroes in addition to the new content. It's a full-priced game, to be sure, but it's a generous package of content. The caveat is that owners of the original game will have to pay the cost of a full game to get the additional content. Another potential problem is that there's nothing new for the original sides, which makes them feel a bit drab in comparison. Who wants to play the boring old Americans and Germans now that the Brits and Panzer Elite have arrived on the scene? With Dawn of War, Relic did a great job offering new races while also showing some love for the original races. Too bad that isn't the case here.
Opposing Fronts does a great job of integrating smoothly online with owners of the original game. Whereas many expansions divide the player community into haves and have-nots, Relic has taken pains to make sure owners of the original game aren't shut out from playing with gamers who bought Opposing Forces. If you don't have the new game, you can still play against its content in multiplayer games. Presumably, seeing the Brits and Germans in action will make players more likely to buy Opposing Fronts. It's nice to see a developer and publisher going out of their way for the integrity of the player community.
Overall, it's great to see Relic still pouring so much new gameplay into Company Heroes. Upon playing the original, it was easy to get the sense that this was a complete package, with scarcely any room to squeeze in any innovation. Opposing Fronts clearly proves that isn't the case. Now more than ever, this is the can't-miss real time strategy game of the year.
The new expansion pack for Company of Heroes adds plenty of great stuff at the cost of some of the game's elegant simplicity.
When a game gets as much praise as our 2006 PC Game of the Year, it can't be easy to decide what to do for an encore. Company of Heroes was a revelation when it first released. Not only did it actually make World War II (a badly overused videogame setting) fun again, its strategic depth, elegance and simplicity raised the bar so high for RTS developers it would be tough for anyone to clear it -- even Relic. That's Opposing Fronts in a nutshell. The expansion pack adds more armies and deeper strategy to Company of Heroes which, almost by default, can't help but be a good thing. If only the new depth and the fun new stuff to play with didn't come at the cost of the elegance and simplicity of the original game.
Two new armies are at the heart of Opposing Fronts. First, the defensively-oriented British 2nd Army is built around tough infantry and insanely big guns. Infantry and sapper units are able to quickly build a wide variety of defensive emplacements ranging from machine-gun pillboxes to 25-pound artillery guns to the thoroughly amazing slit trenches which provide a huge defensive advantage. Lieutenant and Captain units attach themselves to infantry companies and offer great defensive bonuses that travel with them as the company moves. They also sport some of the best artillery units in the game, able to reach across entire maps to rain death and destruction down on enemy forces without ever needing to put their precious Tommies in danger.
The stick-and-move Panzer Elite are completely different. They're the army that's never where you expect it to be. While not nearly as tough as the original German or American squads (to say nothing of the Brits), their strategic flexibility and outrageous speed can help them seize map sectors while their opponents are still sorting through their first veterancy upgrades. Their versatile infantry halftracks are at the heart of their strategy since infantry loaded onto the halftrack can shoot out of it. That allows halftracks to be specially kitted based on the type of infantry that climb aboard. Anti-tank troops on a half-track, for example, make it a pretty decent anti-tank vehicle, while one loaded with infantry upgraded with long-range rifles becomes impromptu anti-infantry snipers. They can also be used to capture map sectors simply by loading and unloading their passengers. Other types of vehicles include supply wagons that can drop remote-controlled "Goliath" bombs and a Jagdpanzer tank-killer that's frankly pretty terrifying.
Both armies are a lot of fun and significantly deepen the strategic options available to the player. The British penchant for defense might bring up notions of cheesy "turtle" strategies in which a player would build impregnable barriers until they can overwhelm the opposition with numbers. Such a comment fails to take into account the skill of Relic's designers. In Opposing Fronts, Brits use their defensive might offensively. British players will slowly progress across the battlefield in a "take-and-hold" style using artillery to clear the way and infantry advances to secure the territory. The Panzer Elite, on the other hand, will find themselves scurrying around to everywhere their enemy isn't, using zippy little scout vehicles and seizing and losing territory a lot. Their ultimate goal is to build up the veterancy of their forces until they can bring out the heavy gear like upgraded Panther tanks or tough little Hetzers and grind the opposition under their treads.
Players will first get down and dirty with the new armies in the two single-player campaigns, one for each army. This marks a nice change from the original game, which only allowed the player to play as the Americans. The first campaign re-visits Operation Market Garden from the perspective of the Panzer Elite. This disastrous Allied push for Germany through occupied Holland is detailed through the experiences of two German brothers, each a commander in the mishmash of German forces that delivered a devastating blow to the largest airborne invasion in history. The second campaign covers the British Army's post-D-Day experience as they push through the French countryside on the way to the liberation of Caen.
Each campaign is fun, though the British Army got the more enjoyable experience. The British campaign offers a lot of strategic variety that really shows off what this new army can do. There's an absolutely brutal block-by-block campaign through the shattered street of Caen that stands proudly with the hedgerow fight for Hill 192 in the original game. An earlier mission to defend a particular hilltop was also a standout as it's just fun to be able to set up an insanely deep defensive perimeter and watch the Germans throw themselves at it.
Missions in the Panzer Elite campaign, while also fun, aren't quite as well-designed. Some are defensive, which makes for interesting challenges considering the offensive and fast-moving nature of the units. Some, such as a great one based on a circular assault on a dug-in British force on Highway 69, actually give the Panzer Elite the chance to show what they can do. Many Panzer Elite missions, however, force the player to be more reactive to pre-scripted circumstances rather than allowing them the freedom to plan.
The original game managed to make soldier voice-overs not only entertaining but also a source of strategic information by having units comment on what was going on in their immediate vicinity. Opposing Fronts goes one better by offering information in the very sound effects of the weapons. Every weapon in the game seems to give a distinctly different sound when fired which, assuming the player can identify it, can give a player the edge needed to counteract it. I realized how important that was during a multiplayer game when the sound of the mortars that my British teammate was using seemed to change. It took a moment before I realized that the sound wasn't the mortar used by a Royal Commando, but was the sound of a Panzer Elite mortar halftrack. It was enough to save my infantry and the assault.
The voiceovers themselves are just as good as the original game's. British army units pop off with accents that actually run the geographic gamut from lower-class rural troopers yelling, "Take that, ya wanker!" to their upper-crust lieutenants and captains saying lines like, "Let's take the point, gentlemen," and "Don't put the kettle on just yet." The Panzer Elite, true to their name, actually have different accents than the regular German army troops (it sounds like there were a lot of upper-class "vons" in Panzer tanks). It would be very easy for an American company to assume all British accents sound like the Londoners seen on the BBC or that all Germans sound like the bad guys from "Die Hard," but -- like the Brooklyn accent of the original American army -- the voice-overs manage to impart just enough verisimilitude that these anonymous units become characters without being caricatures.
It's in multiplayer where the promise and the pitfalls of these new forces really show up. On the up side, the new units take what was already an extraordinary multiplayer experience and make it much, much deeper. As in the original game, each army gets a choice of three "doctrines" that they can implement as they build up battle experience. Royal Artillery, for example, offers enhanced artillery powers along with the utterly unholy M7 Priest mobile fire support vehicle, while Royal Commandos offer several different types of Canadian commando teams that should make our Great White Northern brothers proud. The Panzer Elite can choose between Luftwaffe Tactics, Scorched Earth and the Tank Destroyer doctrine that offers the sweet, sweet Jagdpanther. Each of these doctrines turns the generic force that players start with into specialized killing machines that mesh incredibly well with other players using different doctrines in team-based multiplayer.
The result of this is that multiplayer games just got a lot more complicated -- though mostly in a good way. A British player who knows what he or she is doing makes an incredible support system for an American push. A British Army with Royal Artillery can clear out almost any area on the map, leaving it open to be seized by American tanks and soldiers. Sherman's march to the sea is nothing compared with the empty corridor to German HQ a good British player can create for American iron. British sappers repairing American tanks, fixing American HQs and putting static defenses around the American base managed to turn around at least one multiplayer game I was on the verge of losing. The contributions of the Panzer Elite are more subtle, but just as devastating. The roadblocks available with Scorched Earth have funneled many an American tank column into the sights of a German Tiger and Panzer Elite support vehicles take German tanks that were already tough nuts and make them mobile fortresses. The different combinations and strategies available with six different doctrine combinations is just dizzying.
One of the strengths of Company of Heroes was how intelligent unit AI and elegant design would free the player up to focus on the larger strategy and not have to babysit their armies. While Opposing Fronts' new doctrines add a lot to this "macro-strategy," which is great, the two new armies are also pretty heavy on the micromanagement, which is not. British infantry units are hardy and very expensive, and thus quite valuable. Losing one, especially a veteran unit, is devastating for the British player. As a result, the British are critically dependent on the proper placement of artillery in order to soften up opponents. This can be tough to gauge accurately in the heat of battle, especially when playing against the Panzer Elite who frequently have opposing players hopping around the mini-map like a frenzied grasshopper.
This gets even worse playing as the Panzer Elite. Panzer Elite units get offensive or defensive bonuses as their veteran status increases. The problem is that these bonuses need to be individually selected for every unit by the player. It's not like these bonuses are optional, either. Veterancy is absolutely critical for Panzer victory and missing out on these bonuses can easily lose the game. Half-tracks and other vehicles, for all their versatility, need to be carefully managed and separated into control groups because positioning these things is extremely important. Sending a mortar halftrack to the front of a column during combat is a quick way to lose a really valuable unit.
The worst aspect of this problem is "attached" units like the British Captain or the Panzer Elite supply vehicle. This is a game mechanic where a command unit is tied to a basic squad of soldiers (or in the case of the Panzer Elite, two vehicles are paired up). It's adapted from Relic's own Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series. In that game once the player attached a command unit to a grunt squad, it essentially became part of the squad and added its powers to it. They in effect became a single unit and were used and commanded by the player as such. In Opposing Fronts the player can still lasso-select these attached units separately and give them orders which break their connection to the squad they're supporting, losing them the bonuses the units impart.
In the end, the expansion's problems are far outweighed by its triumphs. Veterans players with plenty of Company of Heroes combat under their belt will eagerly dig into the new expansion pack as the new armies on offer are a lot of fun and will throw plenty of new twists into multiplayer games. They'll also take some getting used to as the level of micromanagement each of them requires make them really only suitable for players willing to put in the time to master them. The result is that the Company of Heroes multiplayer community just became a more unfriendly place for new players. Hopefully that won't keep too many people from joining since the rewards of playing Opposing Fronts are totally worth the effort.
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