Company of Heroes- Tales of Valor Review

BY Nabeel Akhtar | POSTED: 31 May 2009

Great entry for the fans, but may get boring and tedious very quickly.



From the onset, the engine feels similar to Warhammer: Dawn of War 2, albeit with more explosiveness to it. You have your cover system, intense particle effects from all the explosions which are livelier than DoW2, and interestingly running the benchmark is a nice visual treat of what this engine can do at the absolute most zoomed in level. Considering it’s mostly a strategy game and it’s meant to be played top down, the cinematic feel of the action from this point of view is absolutely beautiful.



The level of detail is much higher than previous games, explosions and sound are superb. A note on the sound quality of this game, during the campaign when you hear a tank coming your way your immediate reaction will be to hide your soldiers or reposition your units in such a way that you don’t want to be caught off guard. It’s kind of an instinctual reaction, but pretty hysterical when you try to justify why you reacted that way. The attention to detail to the sounds in the game, results in an accurate effect of said situation when an enemy tank or vehicle is nearby even though you can’t see it.

Getting to play a point of view other than the allies is definitely welcome, Nazi German story for the first time as you control a single tank and follow the events surrounding this particular tank crew. There is one quirk though that I felt, the campaigns seem very straight forward. There isn’t much resource building required, field upgrades seemed to have little importance in the overall mission, however I will say that upgrades are of some use during final missions of each campaign. It seems to have been designed that way on purpose, because when you jump into skirmish or online and resources and control points start factoring in, the difficulty skyrockets.

If you are new to Company of Heroes but have played more traditional RTS games, such as the Command and Conquer series, you are in for an awakening. It’s ridiculously difficult to play a game where everything depends on everything else. Where you position your defensive turrets vs. how you intend to take on that tank. Yes…how you hit the tank even depends, hit it from the side or the back does more damage than simply hitting it head on, which as a matter of fact does very little damage. Couple that with soldiers, specifically anti-tank infantry and you should seriously consider retreat, and hope that you don’t lose your engine.

Maybe that mass army strategy works in more traditional RTS games, whereas here a single machine gunner can mow down most of your infantry. Structures can be garrisoned, but watch out for those flamethrowers, tanks, and grenades. For practically every unit that exists in the game, there exists a counter unit. You want to send a tank out, send it out with some machine gunner infantry, some regular infantry, combat engineers, and maybe a sniper. Each for a different purpose, machine gunners to mow down those units attacking the tank from the side lets say, regular infantry to clear them with a grenade and protect your engineers or to capture control points, your engineers to capture control points as well, or build defensive structures, or to repair that tank on the fly. The sniper to take out targets from a distance and to give you an idea of what’s surrounding the area while taking advantage of the units’ far sight.



The 3 new online modes are the fruit of the basket in this standalone expansion. Those who have played previous Company of Heroes games will be in for a surprise. Each of the modes are now there to force you into a narrower field, but do emphasize co-op play. It might seem like a nuisance but it’s sure to feel much clearer to you once you get going.

The 3 modes are Operation Stonewall, Operation Panzerkrieg and Operation Assault. Players new to the series will find Operation Stonewall to be the closest to what they are used to, however fans of the series should know that it still contains every element unique to the Company of Heroes series. Up to four players are in charge of a single Allied barracks in the middle of a European town. The purpose is to defend against waves of German soldiers and it’s up to the players to come together at defending the town. Choosing one of the available specializations is at the heart of this mode. Each player should pick the one that they feel most comfortable with or able to work with better, so that when the time comes for the next wave they are able to coordinate their troops much more effectively.

Operation Panzerkrieg, and yes as the name implies it involves tanks. One tank per human player actually, across three players. It’s unique however, in the sense that not only are you controlling one tank, you do get to choose which kind of tank and its upgrade path. In essence players who are well versed in this mode can truly annihilate anything should they use tanks that are upgraded with abilities that support the other two in tight spots. For example one person has a Tiger tank, against other tanks, another has an M4 Sherman, against infantry, etc.

Operation Assault is by far the most difficult of the three, similar to the previous mode, this mode puts you in control of a SINGLE unit. Yes you read that right, a SINGLE unit. Each human player chooses one hero type of infantry, so you could be a sniper whereas the second player could be mortar, another could be machine gunner. There does seem to be one issue with it, it is a narrow map, and practically the most effective way at times just seems to be to blow your way through anything to get to the other side before the enemy does the same to you. The AI Infantry does help at times, however if your teammates can coordinate well with you then they are useless.



This brings me to my final quirk about this standalone expansion, all three new campaigns play out on the same map. The same goes for the multiplayer modes, they are on different maps for each operation however everytime you play those specific modes you are confined to playing the map of that operation. As mentioned earlier the Campaign isn’t as epic as the word implies, however the tweaks to the gameplay, and the new multiplayer modes do make up for this. Tales of Valor is definitely worth trying for the fan of the series, there is just the worry that it may get tedious or boring pretty fast.