Get a meaty PC for all the graphical goodness
Graphically, Company Of Heroes is fantastic, but you will need a beefy PC to run it at its best. The HEXUS.gaming Test Rig found it a struggle to get decent frame rates with all the eye candy on. In the options menu you can run a game-engine generated cut scene to check how your system holds up… which is handy as mistakenly running Company Of Heroes on settings beyond your system’s abilities will see you watching a slide show until you get to a point where you can get back to the main menu…
That said, given that you’ll be playing the vast majority of the game from an eagle’s eye view, knocking down the quality and detail settings doesn’t impact hugely on the game itself. After all, from a couple of hundred feet up in the game, who’s going to know that the model textures are a bit blurry close up? Even on low quality settings the units are easy to distinguish from each other and it’s only in the in-game cutscenes that you notice anything.
Click for larger imageThe environment you play in is superb and features something that RTS gamers have been after for a long time: near total scenery destruction. Yep, pretty much everything can be blasted, shot, collapsed and run over. There are a few oddities such as abandoned tractors in fields are seemingly immune to damage and destroyed vehicle carcasses being able to take several hits from tank shells but disintegrate when a tank runs them over.
Sadly, though there is a mild form of ground deformation from heavy shelling, the resulting shellholes don’t offer protection for your infantry, which is a shame as I liked nothing more than blasting the hell out of a forward position with my Howitzer and then moving the troops in for the mopping up. On the flip side, you can see that the Havok physics engine is at work here as shelled houses collapse as they should, towards the blasted side, though the rubble disappears into a generic model.
Click for larger imageUnlike Joint Task Force, which had ragdoll effects for dead enemy soldiers, we’ve got Havok here, blasting everything all over the place. The explosions are suitably impressive, as are the smoke clouds and debris effects… Even the vehicles suspension looks like it’s running over uneven terrain as wheels and tracks move up and down. All that’s missing is some weather effects and perhaps a bit of decent volumetric flaming for the Crocodile tank’s flamethrower…
And as good as the graphics are, the sound is just as good. Off screen units report to you in a tinny, Bakerlite-handset fashion whilst off screen cannon and gunfire has that far away muted echo to it. Up close, there’s plenty of variety in the sounds of the various weapons, so you know before you see it that an MG42 has opened up or a .50 cal heavy machine gun is laying down some fire.
Click for larger imageVoice acting is excellent and gives you a really good idea of the type of person each unit is made up of. For example, the Engineers are obviously ‘New Yoikers’ and forever going on about how it’s just like the garage back home. You’ll often hear your troops grumbling about life in the Army, especially as you ask them to do non-combat duties such as reinforcing defences with sandbags or wire… I don’t know who the main voiceover talent is, but they reminded me very much of Rick Warden’s character, 1st Lt Welsh in Band Of Brothers, which is perfect for Company Of Heroes. I have to say that I’m sure the voice team were having a bit of a giggle in places as the voice and phrases for the light vehicles, especially the halftrack, are probably the campest you’ll ever hear in combat short of going to war with Graham Norton. I couldn’t help but smirk eveytime a camp American accent told me to “Buckle up and hang on!”… But overall, you can’t fault the acting, even if, near the end of the game, you wish they’d recorded just a few more phrases.