Over-reliance on micromanagement makes for an inferior DOW followup.
User Rating: 7.2 | Company of Heroes PC
Company Of Heroes is, in most respects, an excellent game. The single-player campaign is immersive, and the graphics and sound make for a particulary enjoyable experience. Where I find it falls down- and the reason why I refer to it as 'inferior' to it's spiritual predecessor Dawn Of War, is the way in which micromanagement of units has become disguised as 'tactics'. This becomes most apparent if you play the skirmish mode against the CPU. Weapons like machine-guns and anti-tank cannons have a very limited arc-of-fire, typically no more than 90 degrees, so the game encourages you to flank them. In a small-scale engagement, this works fine, but as soon as you get into a battle which covers multiple small skirmishes at once, you'll be left floundering as enemy tanks circle around your guns as their crews sit there and watch. In the same vein, tanks will happily allow the enemy to pound away at their rear amour unless commanded to turn, and every individual infantry unit must be manually told to throw grenades, and to run away from them. The overall effect is that wherever you happen to be looking, you can win, but everywhere else things go wrong almost immediately. Whilst Dawn Of War's tanks and weapon emplacements were less 'realistic' with their all-round armour and fire-arcs, they did at least allow you to leave those units to fight for more than a couple of seconds without becoming totally ineffective, which just isn't possible here. Combine this with the very odd feel of 'building' WWII units at the front line- which can lead to American forces in the final assaults of the war facing endless amounts of enemy armour- and you have a game which, whilst superb, somewhat fails to deliver the experience it promised. Something more along the lines of Ground Control might have been closer to the mark. 
