Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts (PC DVD)

This game (but also the original coh and the third expansion pack Tales of Valor) is really fun and also one of the best Rts that you can play on Pc. It's really different from the "Total War" series, the other great Rts series on Pc, there are not huge battlefields but there's a lot of tactics and strategy anyway. Lot of units, maps and game modes will let this game stay in your Dvd drive for a very long time. You'll enjoy Good Single player campaings, but if you try the online/lan multyplayer experience you'll definetively love this game!

Took me a while to get used to the controls but once you get the hang of it, it's a great game. It is quite difficult and I tend to lose an awful lot of tanks to ambushes but the good old mortars and 6 pounders usually even it up for me. I have had hours of fun with this game.

COH: Opposing Fronts (OF) is stand-alone game that continues the Company of Heroes (COH) franchise. First off, I would not recommend getting COH:OF without the original COH. Having four fractions to play is what makes this game so much better. COH:OF gives you access to new playable factions the British and the Panzer Elite. Each have their benefits and weaknesses and will require new strategies to play with them and against them. Both of these new factions have their own single player campaign with around 8 missions. Basically on the whole about the same content as the original COH that had one campaign with 15 missions. The Panzer Elite campaign has you pitted against the new British army where you fight to defeat the British 1st airborne during Operation Market Garden. The British campaign has you pitted against a mixture of the new Panzer Elite and regular German Wehrmacht units while you move on Caen. Both campaigns are based on the historical WWII actions, but the Market Garden campaign had a more historical feel. I enjoyed both campaigns and found that they helped prepare me for playing online. If you would like to read more about the real battles, I would recommend A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan for Panzer Elite campaign and Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Max Hastings for the British campaign.

For those who have not played the original COH, this game has beautiful graphics. Fully rotatable view with zoom allows you to get into the middle of the fight. Environments that really can be destroyed. Great use of cover and buildings. The music and small arms fire is deafening and immersive. I really enjoyed the ability to pick up enemy weapons. The cut scenes are well written with vivid animations. There are some things I don't like. Line of sight and weapon range are unrealistically short. While some units will fire on troops out of their range of site if there is something ahead that can spot for them, infantry will not engage unless they are within their regular line of sight. This requires some micromanaging, but I didn't find it as cumbersome as other games.

The real action is in the multiplayer side. Speed in taking positions and being able to manage the battlefield are the deciding factor in head to head action. You barely have time to breath when the s*** hits the fan. There is an online ranking system where you play head to head against other players of similar skill and records your win-lose statistics with each army. You can also setup special games with multiple players on each side or even play cooperatively against the computer in skirmishes. You can also save replays so you can watch your exploits or embarrassing defeats at your leisure. It still has a little of Warcraft or Starcraft feel since it does not attempt to be historical (unlimited ammo and ability to build new units), but it is still a lot of fun.

Some notes on patches: I'm using patched version 2.6.0.2. It took 16 separate patches to get it from version 1.0 to current version. Though once you get to 2.1.0.1 the game will download them from inside the game which is better than searching the internet and after version 2.4.0.0 it downloads multiple patches at one time. This is the worst patching system I have ever experienced. If you do not have patience for this or being logged in to play do not buy this game.

Stability: I found the game to be very stable. I did not encounter any crashes while playing the campaigns or online. I did experience some rare crashes on the original COH, but not on COH:OF. I think with all the patches they have gotten rid of the crashing problems, but some say they still have problems. I am running a quad Intel with Vista, 8GB RAM, and 1GB NVidia card

For the price it is at now, it is well worth the risk of not working on your machine. Do not buy used, however, as your key may have already been used. There is also a mod to allow you to play as the Russians called Eastern Front. Search google for Company of Heroes Russian to find it. The only downfall with the Russian mod is that very few players have it so online play is limited.