Halcyon | flow

Calm and peaceful; tranquil | Continuity and smoothness of appearance

American Heritage Dictionary 4th. Ed.

Brutal as my defeat was, I still had fun playing the game. It looks fantastic, which is something you have to see first-hand to appreciate. The videos show some of it, but the level of detail is even more impressive than what those low-bitrate XviD clips will show you. By placing the completely unrestricted camera close in to the action at a low angle, you could almost believe you were looking at a quality FPS rather than an RTS.

The gameplay mechnanics were instantly familiar from games like Command and Conquer: Generals and that old standby, Starcraft. Base and unit micromanagement isn't quite as overwhelming as it is in some games. Build times for structures and units are fairly quick, so you can usually get to the action fairly quickly. Another nifty feature that makes managing your troops a bit easier is that you can use the environment moreso than in most RTS games. For example, you can garrison troops in an abandoned civilian house, then convert it into a forward barracks to deploy more troops. You can also use the blasted remains of vehicle units - your own as well as your enemies' - for cover.

The multiplayer is a point of concern, however. The Company of Heroes multiplayer servers only act as a matchingmaking service, connecting you to other players. The game sessions are actually hosted peer-to-peer. This means that the game will operate at a performance level equivalent to the slowest client connected to a game. So, if someone with a PC that barely meets the minimum requirements and a dialup connection jumps in your game, it will slow to a crawl. You can see quite a bit of this in the multiplayer video on the Gallery page. The frequent pauses and hitches aren't the fault of the video encoding; they were the result of players in the game going out of sync due to performance issues. Hopefully this can be improved before the game goes retail.

Overall Company of Heroes is a very promising game. I can already see that it would be great fun as a LAN game and, if the single player campaign is well constructed, it could also be a good solo experience.