The Western Front isn’t as quiet as you may have heard from other sources but the Eastern Front is almost certainly a great deal louder. That’s what Company of Heroes 2 would have you believe at any rate, with a flashy new engine and a great deal of clamour presenting its conflict. But does the long-awaited sequel add anything more than enormous flurries and drifts of snow? I donned my thermal underpants and went to war.>

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It’s a dark time to be a mulitplayer server. From the day you’re born, you’re living on borrowed time, and that goes double if any sort of sequel has your cushy spot on the rack in its sights. Which brings us to the original Company of Heroes. It’s coming up on its seventh birthday, Company of Heroes 2 is about to drop a fresh blanket of powder on the hot summer months, and a sudden publisher shift threw everything out of whack. It is, in other words, a prime candidate for the big server farm in the sky. But hark, against all odds, there is hope. Relic’s keeping its relics up and running by switching services. So long, apparent Aztec wind deity Quazal. Hello, Steamworks.

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One of the many unhappy aspects of the death (sort of – the name still exists and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see it return in some form later on) of THQ is that it had several projects really very close to completion when the axe fell. Foremost, perhaps, of those were Metro: Last Light and snow-bound WW2 strategy game Company of Heroes 2, but fortunately (we hope) both have found new homes. Metro’s with Koch, and Company of Heroes 2 is with SEGA, as is all of Relic – making the house of hedgehog, who also own the Creative Assembly, an unlikely bastion of real-time strategy.

COH2 has a new release date – later than planned but not very far away. It is… Read the rest of this entry..

Nah, only joshing. It’s in June this year. (more…)

OK, hold onto the floppier parts of your brain, because this is about to get a bit complicated. So remember how THQ went bankrupt and fell into bed with “stalking horse bidder” Clearlake Capital? Well, the primary intent of all that was to keep THQ in one piece while dealing with that nasty little “having basically no money” thing, but – at the 11th hour – there was a twist. Creditors decided THQ’s all-or-nothing sales approach wasn’t fair to them (it’d probably pull in less money, after all), and a US bankruptcy court judge agreed. So now THQ’s gone from monolithic one-gulp meal to easily chopped up buffet, and rumor has it that a number of major players are interested in various series, games, and franchises.

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Company of Heroes 2 is coming along marvelously, but let’s be honest here: it’s not exactly the departure one might expect from the company of game developers that made the brilliantly daring leap from Dawn of War 1 to Dawn of War 2. Instead, we’re getting more of what we loved, but with small tweaks, a heaping mountain of snow, and the sobering realization that it’s apparently not> a good idea to joyride multi-ton tanks across nearly opaque films of ice. During an interview with RPS, however, game director Quinn Duffy said that Company of Heroes definitely isn’t stuck in a tiny, World-War-II-shaped box. In the future, he excitedly explained, the series could potentially go “anywhere.”

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Last week I got to sit down and make my hands do things in Relic’s next strategy game, the Eastern Front-set World War II war of men that is Company of Heroes 2. While previously we’ve been shown frozen landscapes with dramatic new snow effects, this time I got thrown into the mud.>

I was in a war, you know. A big war, with explosions and tanks and dug-outs and men with flamethrowers and men with mortars and men with machine guns and men with rocket-propelled grenades. It was awful. So I’m only too happy to go back to it.

In my couple of hours with Company of Heroes 2, I swiftly established that it is very much the sequel to Company of Heroes. Perhaps more so than I’d been expecting, given the action-RPG stylings of Dawn of War 2 was a sharp turn to the left from Dawn of War 1′s tried and tested real-time strategising. Company of Heroes is Real War though, so a careful sticking to strategic roots is to be expected.

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Once, I thought there was at least some cold, profit-maximizing business precision that guided whatever awfulness-seeking missile explodes games into not-great movies, but now I’m not even sure of that anymore. I mean, don’t get me wrong: Company of Heroes is a work of absolute RTS brilliance, but it’s not exactly a household name. And yeah, much as I think my> most brilliant tactical masterpieces – for instance, a nuanced little number I like to call TANKS EVERYWHERE – are worth their own movie adaptations, the game’s brand of top-down contemplaction doesn’t exactly make for the best big screen material. Then again, this one’s direct-to-DVD, so I guess that solves that. But obviously, making the leap to a new medium required Company of Heroes to take some liberties. For instance, when I say “making the leap,” I mean that literally. Across the top of a train. Like Indiana Jones. See for yourself after the break.

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Update: I got in touch with the Humble Bundle folks to find out more about how this out-of-nowhere partnership came about. See what they had to say after the break.

Original: I was incredibly tempted to begin this post with a joke about how the charity slider on this Humble Bundle is redundant, because THQ is already basically a charity. That would be mean, though, so I opted to– oops, I already did it. Hm. Shame backspace was never invented. Anyway, the latest bundle of densely packaged humility puts the spotlight on a decidedly non-indie THQ, but oh well. Indie’s a pretty terrible word when it’s used to write off great games because they weren’t coded by a half-person team in a garage-bedroom constantly beset by subarctic winds and ravenous wolverines. So, right then, let’s take a look inside.

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Could it really be that Relic are at last working on some manner of follow-up to their very well-received and very well-realised World War II RTS Company of Heroes? It could, claims PC Gamer’s print edition, claims Kotaku, claims VG247. I cannot verify this, but on this slowest of slow news days I shall report it nonetheless. There are no details because this is mere rumour, but though PCG are in the habit of eating live babies they aren’t generally in the habit of being scurrilous, so let’s hope they’re on the money here. (more…)

Oh, old man Company of Heroes, so good to see you again. Pull a comfy chair up to the fire and tell us another war story. It must hurt, having seen your younger, free to pay brother pass away so unexpectedly last year, but at least we’ve still got you. And what’s that? You’re not ready to go gently into that good night yourself yet? You have a healthy new patch laden with six extra maps and a bewildering array of balance changes? Excellent.
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