Company of Heroes

As a child I simply adored my plastic army men. As a grownup I still do but I need a more mature excuse to play with them. Since I'm not into war games or anything of that nature, I believe Company of Heroes for the PC is the closest I'll get to reliving my childhood war simulations for a number of reasons.
 
From the outset it is obvious that Relic has paid serious attention to all aspects of CoH. Building have varying states of decay dependent on how they are damaged, vehicles can crash after being damage or have different components malfunction, soldiers and terrain are sent flying by physics-based explosions, and overall one gets the sense that the developer genuinely attempted to bring the typically abstracted game world of an RTS  to life. 
 
CoH plays similar to the Dawn of War games in that resources are not gathered by drone units but rather accumulated by capturing sectors of the map. It is a resource mechanic that encourages players to engage the enemy and dissuades base building and turtling (to an extent). The base building aspects of CoH are limited and rightfully so. Only the most necessary structures are provided to justify the production of the game's infantry, vehicle, and tank based units.  
 
CoH further emphasizes aggressive play by rewarding experience points when enemy units are destroyed. These experience points can then be spent to acquire special abilities organized into infantry, armor, and airborne skill trees. The different skill trees are tailored to different play styles and are all well balanced and worth exploring. Deploying their abilities can be rather devastating and quite entertaining when one is not on the receiving end.
 
CoH has technically competent visuals and sound, but somewhat overreaches the limits of an RTS engine by attempting to tell the game's story using the in-game engine. In this effort, the game starts off quite well with the beach landings at Normandy. The RTS engine does not hold up as a story-telling mechanism however which nullifies the affect of any story telling that occurs. 
 
The original CoH campaign that accompanies the aforementioned story-telling effort is also rather disappointing. The campaign is rather short at 15 missions, but drags on due to the similarity of missions. Campaign missions have different objectives, but they all play out in the same way by boiling down to the capture of territory in order to sufficient resources to fund the next push toward more territory. Missions that bend the standard game play formula would have gone a long way to lending the original campaign more character in addition to a better delivered story.  Cut-scenes and mission briefings a la Starcraft may seem archaic in this day and age, but they do a much better job of conveying an RTS story than ugly in-engine close ups of  generic infantry units.  
 
The charm of CoH is not lost though as I cannot help but relive my childhood memories of playing with army men when maneuvering units across the map. Maybe it is the rather plastic brown look of everything in the CoH world or maybe CoH's tactical combat and territorial strategies just perfectly simulate what was going on in my imagination all those years ago. Either way, CoH is a very competent RTS and it's a pity that the game's original campaign does not capitalize on its game play potential. I will be playing CoHs two expansions soon and I hope their campaigns deliver on the excellent ground work laid by the original. 
 
(This review does not encompass any of the multiplayer aspects of CoH since I did not play the game on-line and I also do not intend to. Its comments and review score are therefore solely targeted at the game's campaign and skirmish modes. )