None of this is to say it’s not enjoyable. And honestly, when 3 hours of your 4.5 hour game are spent playing as the Nazis Germans, you’re either astonishingly confident or perhaps not entirely clear what the audience wants from a WW2 game. While it’s very different to Dawn of War II’s weirdy-beardy semi-RPG singleplayer, there is a similar sense of disjointedness, of a collection of strong ideas that don’t mesh together as smoothly as they could. Imagine a first person shooter where grenades were an intangible, invisible essence that gradually replenished over time, rather than something your character had x number of. The blend of organic, what-you-see-is-what-you-can-use with abstract, icon and resource-based special abilities is uncomfortable. While it's a more fulfilling approach than the original COH's singleplayer, these two styles of strategy don't quite mix seamlessly here, and it’s yet another affirmation that MoW is a far better singleplayer game than CoH has ever been. In fact, it’s closer to the excellent Men of War than Company of Heroes – base-building is excised in most of the maps, and there’s a gentle focus on acquiring weapons and ammunition (for special powers rather than units’ guns) from what’s already on the map. No glorified skirmish maps here – every enemy, and every enemy movement, is pretty much pre-determined. Dawn of War II’s campaign borrowed heavily from Diablo, Soulstorm tried the Total War thing, and now this is about the most tightly-scripted RTS ever made. Lately, Relic have been experimenting heavily with ways to reinvent singleplayer strategy, as it’s something that often struggles to make the same impact as the multiplayer component.
COH OPPOSING FRONTS AMAZON SERIES
The main conceit is the titular stories of heroism – three short singleplayer campaigns, of around 90 minutes each, presenting some of World War II’s most theoretically thrilling scuffles within a heavily-scripted, heavily-cutscened series of linked levels. It’s not a failure, not at all – it’s simply a little pointless. I’ve personally settled, poisonous little cynic that I am, on there being a dictat from above that more COH would make money, so someone threw something together. Similarly, this standalone expansion (though it does plug into existing COH installs if you have ‘em) is a strange hybrid of inventiveness and incoherence.Īs a result (or perhaps a cause), it’s remarkably hard to identify quite why Tales of Valor exists. Perhaps its genuine boldness, or a decision that these were the most interesting tales to tell, but frankly I’d imagine it’s more just one symptom that Company of Heroes perhaps isn’t being as finely-managed as it once was, now Dawn of War II’s the new baby. Quite obviously, it’s not that Relic are all secretly Axis fanboys, or that they think their players are. We’re by now fairly accustomed to and comfortable with occasionally stepping into Axis jackboots in World War II games, but to have an entire game place them largely centre-stage and thus the de facto heroes of the piece is a really odd decision, to say the least.
When a game’s called ‘Tales of Valor’ and over two-thirds of its running time has you playing as Nazis Germans, it’s hard not to wonder if there was some sort of breakdown in internal communications. Is it the meaty expansion we've been praying for, or money-grabbing tokenism? My hammer of ultra-judgement falls on it below. I duly celebrated Easter by killing a lot of men in it.
The second expandalone (YES I SAID THE DEVIL-WORD) for Relic's sumptuous World War II RTS hit our excited PCs late last week.
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