![]() 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 But it was a shock to the system.The Good: A joyous return to CoH roots of small, highly strategic RTS gaming I can take some grief when the missions are as fun and varied as they are. My first foray into Ardennes Assault ended with a frustrated whimper when I realized I was completely screwed, three missions from the final battle, because I wasn’t careful enough with my manpower more than 10 hours ago. Combine that with the one available save file, which autosaves after each mission, and you’ve effectively got a mandatory iron man mode that can’t be turned off. That wasn’t explained clearly up front, so it was a bit jarring when I found out the hard way. When it gets low enough, the company is disbanded outright on the campaign map, and losing all three means restarting the campaign. But each was also limited by a manpower pool, which became shallower with every casualty sustained in combat. Each company gains veterancy for completing missions, and upgrading its ability trees let me customize them in interesting ways. Well, that and the fact that every squad I lost brought me one step closer to outright losing the campaign. While any of my commanders would wax melancholic about missions in which we took too many casualties, it was Vastano’s almost unhinged, cuss-spattered rants that made me feel the worst. Thrust into command after the death of his superior, he isn’t exactly what I would call “management material.” Leading the Airborne, notable for their ability to drop behind enemy lines and call in heavy air support, he has a very, “War sucks, what am I doing here?” outlook on our situation. They quickly became my favorite company, able to quickly deploy a lot of versatile firepower anywhere on the map, and capture multiple control points before the enemy could react. Bill Edwards is a third-generation soldier with equal doses of optimism and idealism, leading the extremely mobile and aggressive Mechanized Infantry. Making smart use of assault engineers and fixed emplacements, Derby’s boys were my go-to workhorses for any mission where I just needed to hold the damn line. Kurt Derby of the Support Company is a veteran of the first World War who continuously laments the plight of the “kids” under his command. Each has its own interesting units and abilities, and a voiced commander with context-sensitive dialogue and a unique personality and backstory that helps make them feel like real people I didn’t want to get killed. My left, right, and… other left hands in this endeavour are three persistent companies that can move, engage enemies, take casualties, and be upgraded independently. Taking a cue from some of Relic’s best single-player experiences in the Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War franchise, this stand-alone expansion features an open-ended campaign map on which I was charged with pushing the Third Reich out of the greater Belgium area.
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