This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Company of Heroes [official site].

The Tiger tanks come rolling in, the artillery comes thundering down. Walls are blown wide open, buildings collapse on themselves. In Company of Heroes, the battlefield is ever-changing, munitions cutting into the map new opportunities for flanking and to be flanked. Confident pushes turn to disaster as the enemy punches through rear guards, and last-ditch defences are saved as the cavalry smashes through barricades. Company of Heroes is a deeply dynamic RTS, something that’s all down to:

THE MECHANIC: Destructible environments Read the rest of this entry »

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.
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Among the many things that might wake you up in the morning – coffee, cigarettes, aggressive thrash metal – nothing really comes close to being chased by a towering Space Marine Titan, spewing out fire and bullets in a wanton display of horrifying aggression as pitiful Orks scatter and flee. Dawn of War 3’s [official site] invigorating multiplayer is like a shot of adrenaline, blood-pumping, loud and messy.

Based on my time with it, there’s a great deal going on in Relic’s latest foray into the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40K. It’s not entirely unlike attempting to play the previous two Dawn of Wars at the same time, a mashup of each game’s best bits, but with more stuff drawn from both the tabletop games and even other genres. Read the rest of this entry »

Along with the rest of the Ork faction, Dawn of War III [official site] is rolling out the red carpet – well, the battle-worn, looted and bloodspattered carpet – for a familiar face: Gorgutz ‘Ead ‘Unter. The warlord took a break from the franchise for the second game but is returning with a mighty power klaw and a striking yellow makeover for Relic’s third game in the series. The devs are keeping schtum about most of the narrative side of things for now, but were more than happy to chat about the new look for the remodelled collector of skulls (and other shiny gimcrackery).

Art director, Matt Kuzminski, was on hand to discuss gigantic bionic arms, spiked punching fists and swaggering cubes… Read the rest of this entry »

In 2001, Band of Brothers was still airing on HBO and Canadian developer Relic Entertainment was finishing up development of Impossible Creatures, its freaky animal RTS. Space and sci-fi had been its muse for years, but it found, in the increased cultural interest in World War 2, another setting and the impetus for Company of Heroes.

Relic celebrated the game’s tenth anniversary this month. It remains one of the most acclaimed RTS games of all time, lavished in 2006 with glowing reviews and heaps of awards. I’ll mostly remember it as the reason I got chewed out by a lecturer for dozing in class, after a long night of liberating Europe.

We’ve talked four of the original developers into taking a trip down a potholed, tank-lined memory lane with us.

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Even though Sega have been publishing PC strategy and simulation games for years now, I still can’t see the company logo or hear the word without thinking back to hours spent at schoolfriends’ houses, trying to work out if Sonic was too fast or I was too slow. The acquisition of Amplitude was the point that I decided that I needed to ask Sega a very simple question: “Do you want to marry PC strategy games?”

At Gamescom, I sat down with Jurgen Post, COO of Sega of Europe.

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Last month, I visited Relic at their home in Vancouver. As well as spending a few hours with a single, complete mission from the Dawn of War III [official site] campaign, I had the chance to sit in on short presentations from various members of the team, demonstrating how their own contributions and creativity become part of the bigger picture. There was a lot to absorb, including enough environmental variety to excite the extraterrestrial explorer in me (ruined temples on jungle planets? Yes please), but one series of brief videos stood out, despite containing nothing that hinted at previously unseen planets or units.

The best of the videos used simple shapes to tell me everything I needed to know about the game’s races, and how well Relic understand them.

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

I suspect but I don’t know that Relic’s stompy-squishy-shooty Only War third-person action game Space Marine is one that has aged rather well over the years. I base this on two things: one, occasional enthusiastic chatter on Twitter. Two: a regular, strong urge to revisit it.

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I’ve never seen anything quite as Warhammer 40k as the fire that rains from the sky when Relic’s representative calls in orbital bombardment on an Eldar army. It’s like the finger of an extremely angry god, a column of flame that can be dragged around the planet surface, disintegrating any unit that it touches. Eldar become brittle silhouettes, elevated by the white heat for a moment as if undergoing a warped Ascension, and then they crumble to ash. This is Dawn of War III [official site] and it’s hideous, awesome and garish.

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