That heavily forested terrain was the scene of an enormous mechanized German counterassault against a much smaller allied force. So without even being a big history buff, I had high hopes for this standalone installment of Company of Heroes set in Ardennes. It didn’t help matters that the production queue was only three deep so you had to keep going back to your man factories to replenish them (Starcraft queues are what, 8 deep? 9? A game designed to make big armies). The Eastern front in WWII was a reaping machine for Russian soldiers, which created a frustrating clickfest along the front line as you tried to replace soldiers that were busily dying at a furious rate.

As a guy closing in on 50, my days of making a hundred mouse clicks a minute are pretty well behind me, so I gravitated towards CoH.Īnd not to turn this into a review for CoH2, but that was a big part of what I found about the CoH2 early missions that was so disappointing. Units were relatively expensive and took a long time to build and unit caps were low, and simply trying to amass the largest force was not a solid recipe for success because of the rock-paper-scissors unit balancing act. Company of Heroes had a more tactical pace. Starcraft carried strong RPG elements in their command units (a least in single player) and had a very high twitch factor if you wanted to be good at it (I recall reading somewhere that the really champion-level Starcraft players issue more than a command every second as they ultra-micromanage their troops). The offerings that remained dwindled down to Starcraft and Company of Heroes, and though both were RTS games they had significant differences. Some games became RPG/RTS hybrids or action/RTS hybrids which gradually dropped their RTS elements entirely while other series just kind of imploded (I’m looking at you, the smoking debris that was the C&C franchise). As a big RTS fan, it was a good time for me, salad days as it were, but all good things must end.

Warcraft, Starcraft, C&C, Warlords Battlecry, Warhammer 40k, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander. There was a time, and it feels like it wasn’t all that long ago, when the market was chock full of RTS games. The Ugly: Incomplete tutorials leave all but CoH veterans scrambling The Good: A joyous return to CoH roots of small, highly strategic RTS gaming

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