Many of you have probably at one time or another played Company of Heroes which was born on September 12, 2006 by the developer Relic, the graphical engine running the game was fully developed in-house by the developers themselves. Honestly I have to admit when I crossed paths with this game I absolutely loved it! The physics and the lighting and the havoc system they had within the game was ahead of its time and brought even some of the best computers to a stand still at times.

I think they ultimately mastered de-forming terrain and blowing holes into buildings, which after enough punishment, would collapse bringing any of your enemies down with it. The attention to detail they did was just amazing when it came to blowing the sh*t out of the map, you could mine bridges and set tank traps which was just awesome in terms of replayability for different maps. I remember a specific map called St. Hilaire which was a narrow map with a small warehouse district in the middle. More often than not, the person who controlled the warehouse district was going to end up being the winner. I loved putting my snipers in buildings waiting for the unsuspecting troop to become my next target. I’d mine out all the narrow roads between buildings making the tanks nothing more than road  blocks. The enemy would try to bring troops to fix the tank only to get picked off by my sniper fire.

Now I followed the CoH community pretty heavily for awhile and it was no secret at the top levels the game suffered from some imbalances that became very annoying and everybody grumbled over Relics inaction regarding it. On September 25, 2007  Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts released, which brought in 2 entirely new factions, the British 2nd Army and the German Panzer Elite. Remember how I mentioned people were already a bit frustrated by the balance issues in CoH? Well toss that all out the door and in comes the British with mobile bases and artillery that will wipe out you and your base in minutes. But hey thats an entirely new subject which will come down the road. Back to the topic.

Well EA / Relic have decided to bring Company of Heroes online (COHO) to everybody FREE of charge! It’ll allow Axis and Allies to play against each other online. They’ve done some online optimization with something called “Company Commander” which allows you to customize your avatar and the new commander tree that you can choose to start specializing in as you play more games online. The game will also be brought to China and Korea which will give them the opportunity to start playing, although its in beta for them  until further notice it should be available to American players sometime September of 2010.

Related posts:

1. Tera Online anybody?
2. Sony releases “Premium Online Services”