If you're looking for something to compare to Company of Heroes, then Dawn of War is good start. Prior to Relic's awesome RTS game, there where so few Warhammer-based videogames that you'd be forgiven for thinking that none existed at all - in fact it's just as well if you did think that, because there was an untapped source of limitless material with which to make some truly great games and those few that had come before felt like nothing more than failed attempts to sell themselves using a popular franchise. It wasn't until Dawn of War that the potential of a great Warhammer game finally became realised.

We're in similar waters with Company of Heroes, as the source material is all too familiar, and while it has occasionally produced some excellent results, far too many games feel like they're using World War II as an excuse to ride off the success of a popular setting and the most highly acclaimed games within it. This is where Relic comes in again; not content with the success garnered from past efforts on the Homeworld and Dawn of War games, they're back to make World War II fun again - and largely succeed with a game that all future WWII RTS games will now have to aspire to. Don't be surprised if your initial impressions resonate not one ounce of emotion though - the "So what?" beginnings leave you wondering what all the fuss is about as, once again, you find yourself in familiar territory, killing Nazis in famous battles following the D-Day landings.

The single player offers up only one campaign and, like Dawn of War, it only focuses on one side of the conflict, namely the Americans. The similarities do not end there, as Company of Heroes uses several feature borrowed from DoW that'll be instantly recognisable to those who've played Relic's previous game, but they do contain some noticeable changes - realism being one them. Squads, for instance, small groups of soldiers trained as one unit rather than individuals, form the backbone of your army. They're with you throughout much of the game, gaining experience along the way and using a varied array of abilities. Defying traditions, squads do not progressively weaken as they take more damage; instead even slight hits from a sniper rifle or machine gun can drop half of a squad's number before they even reach the target, making the usual tactics of running towards an enemy until you've either overwhelmed them by sheer force in numbers or lose all your men in the attempt rather redundant.

The use of cover and flanking aren't just tactics offered to you as an alternative; they're the two things you'll fast need to master if you want to have any chance of surviving to the end of each level. Take cover for example; every wall, every burnt out vehicle, even the debris caused by blowing up a building or a crater left by an artillery shell, offers up some form of protection and you'll be wise to use it at every opportunity, because you can rest assured that the enemy are equally adept at exploiting its defensible bonuses just as much as you. Suddenly the gameplay becomes just as intense as a first person shooter; you're not just wading into battle in suicidal attempts to crush the enemy with more soldiers than him - you're diving from cover to cover, getting your machine gunners and mortars set up to provide support fire while making every use of your hand grenades that can demolish an enemy squad in one go if you hit them just right. And at the end of it, when success is guaranteed, you get a real sense of relief and achievement - you've just defeated the enemy, not because you had more men, but because you used the environment to your advantage.

It's similar with flanking; some objectives require you to route out entrenched soldiers who may have their own set of machine gunners and mortars and attempting a direct assault will result in almost complete failure, as your squad's morale takes a nose dive when attempting to tackle heavily defended units. Should a squad get caught out in the open with nowhere to hide, they become pinned down, rendering them unable to return fire and they will be wiped out unless ordered to retreat back to base.

There are thing you soon become aware of though, like how realism plays its part. Machine gunners and cannons, any of those units who use heavy weapons, are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to protecting themselves from all angles. They cannot fire from a new position without first going through the time consuming task of dismantling their weapons, moving and then setting it all back up again leaving themselves vulnerable to attack from behind. The levels are always large enough for you to scour out and find alternative routes to heavily defended positions - sneaking around the back and lobbing a few grenades into a machine gun nest can kill its crew before they know what's going on. Furthermore, they leave behind their weapons ready for you to waltz on in and secure them for your own use.

If you really must rely on the old tactics of charging enough units at a target and swarming it, then tanks do provide more than enough support for brute force. They come in a number of varieties, but you'll mostly use just two, the standard tank shelling Sherman and its flame-throwing counterpart. Both are great for different things; the standard version is your one true friend against enemy tanks, although with armour being weaker on the sides and back than on the front, you're still forced to use tactics against the enemy's more impressive armoured units. The flame-thrower tank on the other hand is the best anti-infantry vehicle in the game; it can burn out cannon crews with little fuss and soldiers holed up inside buildings seal their own fate, as not even the relative safety of bricks and mortar will protect them for long. They are vulnerable though, as infantry can still cause a problem, sneaking in and out of hedgerows with rocket launchers and causing critical damage before your tanks can react.

Your squads and armour need to be used together to ensure each other's survival; tanks can be repaired and soldiers replaced but rarely can you find the time to do so before forced to go headfirst into battle again. It's also important, as only your infantry can to secure new resources. Once more taking its inspiration from DoW, resources (here as Manpower, Munitions and Fuel) take the form of strategic points dotted around each level that you must send your infantry in to capture and hold, keeping them from the enemy.

New to this dynamic is the use of territory; each strategic point controls a zone that once captured is relinquished into your control, the result being that you can build structures and buy upgrades in this territory where you couldn't before. Crucially, territories are linked, so capture a strategic point at the other end of the map and you don't get its resources until you've captured the territory that lies in between that point and your base. This effectively means you create rather simplistic supply lines and if an enemy captures territory from you in the centre of the map he can cut you off from the rest of your resources elsewhere. You're forced to keep on the move all the time in each level, to get those strategic points and silence the barracks and tank depots that the enemy uses to continually pump out units with - it's a constant unrelenting struggle to fight back the enemy while attempting to sustain control. It's difficult, but challenging and rewarding. Objectives vary; often you're given simple tasks to do at the beginning of each level that always lead to something more complex later, with medals handed out to you should you complete certain tasks within an allotted time.

The levels vary enough so that you never get the sense of repetition, or it could be because you're always on the move that you rarely get time to take stock of what's going on. One level in particular puts you charge of building defences around a town you captured in the previous level, building anti-tank cannons, train mortars and infantry and setting them all up. It's simple stuff and for the first ten minutes it works in halting the enemy advance. Then the enemy commander gets wise to your plan and unleashes a devastating artillery barrage that shatters your speakers and demolishes that lovely defensive line you spent so long arranging. The rest of the level becomes a non-stop battle for survival as the enemy sends his tanks charging through your now exposed defences and onwards towards the final objective, with only you standing in his way, desperately holding on with the last remaining squads under you command, hoping and praying that reinforcements arrive before you are finally overwhelmed. It's an exhausting experience, leaving you little time to admire the impressive graphical detail of the shattered town you're meant to be defending.

The graphics aren't the sharpest around, but the detail is impressive - each and every tank and soldier is lovingly recreated from their real life counterparts, but as good as the units look, it's the destructive environments you'll come to appreciate more, with just about every building capable of being levelled to its foundations, as well as explosions so impressive that it's almost difficult to feel intimidated by explosions in other strategy games after playing this! The sound in RTS games is never as impressive as those of other genres, while the music on offer is generic pap that adds nothing to the experience, but it doesn't really need to - in the heat of battle the rattling of machine gun fire and sound of very, very loud explosions going off in your ear do give you sense of being plunged into the midst of an intense conflict.

The game gets progressively harder as you move through it; the enemy forces become larger and more determined, while their use of special abilities such as the above mentioned artillery strikes (which you yourself can use through gaining points that unlock new abilities) can often stop your attempts to gain the upper hand dead in their tracks. The AI isn't perfect, but it is more cunning than is often the case in RTS games; just try and win a skirmish game after selecting the highest difficulty setting for the AI - it's impossible! He'll chew you up and spit you out before you've had time to build your first squad. It's generally easier, if only by a bit, to try your luck on the multiplayer, where you also get to choose to play as the Axis and use their vehicles and units.

Abilities play more of an important role in skirmish and multiplayer games. Doing well against your opponents awards you points to spend on three different schools of abilities, varying for both the Allied and Axis sides. The Americans for instance can choose Airborne, giving a mixture of abilities that can give them temporary air support such as bombers or send in paratroopers anywhere on the map, while the Germans on the other hand can call on the Blitzkrieg, using abilities to rally forth a small squad of anti-tank soldiers and a not so small tank to deploy at your leisure. But there's a hitch - the best abilities can cost a fortune in resources and these are your most precious commodities in multiplayer games. Somehow managing to make the single player game's pace seem slower, multiplayer games are a mad race for resources, as the more you have the faster you can build heavy units and claim dominance on the battlefield. You'll never get the chance to build up larger forces at the beginning of the game, so you fast have to deploy as many of the cheapest units you can to claim strategic points and get ahead.

This does offer up its own set of problems and if the other player is used to tank rushing he'll quickly secure most of the strategic points and roll out his first heavy units before you've even seen him, but new strategies are also introduced to the mix; the simple supply lines become important, because if you cut off the other player's link to some of his resources elsewhere in the map, it can severely stunt his progression and give you temporary advantage. It's a small tactic, but in multiplayer games it can make all the difference.

Niceties aside, Company of Heroes does suffer from some problems. The AI is a little erratic - while squads do dive for cover when they need to without you having to step in and tell them, when it comes to actually sticking behind cover they tend to get a little overexcited and break from their defensive positions to attack the enemy head on. Tanks are also a pain to look after; when under attack, logic dictates that when ordered to retreat you'd do so driving backwards so as not to expose the weaker, more vulnerable armour, yet too all often tanks turn their backs to an enmy tank as they drive away and take a few devastating hits while they retreat. The only other real problem, which was also the main criticism concerning Dawn of War, is its lack of a varied campaign - there's only one side to play as and it would have been nice to have a mixture of different sides, or a German campaign at least. Still, this is a relatively minor critisism for a game that gets so much right where so many other WWII games have gone wrong over the years.

For once, Company of Heroes feels less like a game attempting to sell itself on a popular theme that seems guaranteed to make a buck, and more like a great game that just happens to use a tried and tested point of history for its setting. Company of Heroes is a fast paced arcade action strategy whose tendencies towards realism often make it feel as cinematically intense as any first person shooter - it might be yet another WWII game but it's definitely one of the best.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).