One minute you’re responsible for rooting a sniper out of a difficult nest, and the next you’re securing a base, or planning a multi-pronged assault.
These missions are expansive, with multiple difficult stages spread over broad and detailed maps. It’s not Oscar-worthy, but it does the job of keeping you playing for just one more mission. Overall, the campaign does a good job of giving your participation in the Battle of Normandy significance, always tying your mission objectives to the greater effort. It’s a dramatic depiction of zipping airplanes, trundling tanks, and roaring anti-aircraft guns, but these scenes are less successful when zoomed in to the blurry camouflage textures covering its soldiers. The campaign story is told through highly cinematic cutscenes obviously inspired by Band of Brothers. Vehicles lose control, flame out, and skid off the road to blow up. Buildings and walls crumble realistically. What is impressive is the level of detail wrapped up in all that brown and gray. Just as many games of that era that sought to portray themselves as grim and realistic, Company of Heroes features a de-saturated brown and gray palette that while accurate, is not too pleasant to look at. It’s thrilling, and later campaign missions become even more exciting, as the game constantly adds new units and tactics to keep you on your toes. A massive wave of German armor arrives that sees your forces pushed back to the near point of destruction before your – scripted – reinforcements arrive. It's a dramatic depiction of zipping airplanes, trundling tanks, and roaring anti-aircraft gunsĪ high note occurs early on in a challenging defensive effort on a map that you have spent the last couple missions slowly conquering.
You can also use a convenient pop-up wheel to make specific orders. You can easily handle your squads by tapping a few icons in the squad list rather than seeking out tiny gray-brown soldiers on a gray-brown map. There are a lot of ways Company of Heroes makes for an ideal mobile strategy game – just by being squad-based, giving orders using fingers, rather than precision mouse clicks, is made much easier. You get more resources by taking objectives, and reinforcing and upgrading your units in the field, as the Germans provide constant resistance. There’s none of the tedious resource-gathering and base-building that you’ll find in those games more directly influenced by Warcraft. It focuses tightly on World War II tactics, as you control a handful of squads rather than a whole army, as they attempt to take back the hedgerows of northern France in the Battle of Normandy.
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If you’ve got an Android or iOS device, and you love real-time strategy, Company of Heroes might be the game for you. Improbably, this experience has arrived in the form of a port for a fourteen-year-old classic. Where the titans of the genre measure skill partly in clicks-per-minute, it’s tough to imagine a solid RTS experience that brings that same micro-management to a touchscreen. September 9, 2020: Company of Heroes is launching on Android and iPhone, so we’ve updated our review accordinglyĪlthough RTS is one of the most popular genres on PC, there’s been a lot of difficulty bringing those experiences to mobile.