Have You Played… Company of Heroes?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Pew pew pew pew pew! That’s nothing like any of the sounds that happen in 2006 real-time strategy game Company of Heroes. I just like pretending to shoot you.

This was the game that made me like RTS again. Burnt out on Command and Conquers and yearning for something a little fresh, CoH delivered. It dispensed with large swarms of units and put small squads under your charge, yet that was often enough to do everything you wanted. Fights were won by taking cover, surviving, and making sure your wee men didn’t overstretch themselves as they took on the map, sector by sector. But that isn’t what I loved most about it. What I loved was turtling.

Yes, I’m a scoundrel. But I’m a scoundrel with an obsessive need to make each area as secure as possible. The barbed wire and landmines on offer here made many of my missions slow crawls toward suffocating the enemy in his own turf. I never played multiplayer, because I’m slow and stupid. But if there’s a game I praise as refreshing the whole genre for me, it’s this one.