Company of Heroes Review

This review is going to be a descriptive and subjective analysis of Company of Heroes.  I dislike assigning explicit numerical values to reviews because the scales are not transmissible from person to person.  Overall picture- I quite liked it, but I have some caveats.  Company of Heroes is an interesting take on the RTS game, borrowing heavily from Dawn of War philosophically.  The basic idea is that you shouldn’t have to worry about your economy too much, instead focusing on where to put your troops and what to do with them.  This review must necessarily compare Dawn of War to CoH because they’re just so similar, except CoH takes place in WWII, and Dawn of War is in some far-future universe.  As a quick summary, Company of Heroes is a much improved version of Dawn of War, featuring numerous new gameplay mechanics and an improved economy that fulfills its purpose much better than Dawn of War’s did- simplifying the economic aspect to free up the player for focusing on combat.

Filed under: News & Articles, Posts by Evan

Why Is Strategy Fun?

Why are strategy games fun, and why do we care?  This is the first question that needs to be addressed before any attempt to build a better RTS game is undertaken.  Games like Half-Life were built from the ground up based on questions like this, specifically by trying to create an immersive novel, and with every facet of the game bent towards its ultimate purpose, the result is highly polished.  Whether it’s a success or not is subjective, but I say that Half-Life, and its successors are the Canterbury Tales in the history of single-player video games, and demonstrated what it is that the medium can and should become.  Strategy games are more complex than creating a single linear story because a single game actually embodies a single instance of a solution space that can be immensely large, and using a wide variety of starting parameters such as player skills, preferences, etc.  So if we are to plan what strategy games should become, first we need to figure out their basic elements, and the proper tools and methods used to construct such a game.  Let’s begin by figuring out what has made past strategy games successful.

Filed under: Posts by Evan, RTS Concept , game design, games, rts, strategy