Like most gamers I’ve fought through my fair share of World War 2 scenarios. I’ve been through Normandy more times than I’d like to count, taken Carentan and San Mer Eglise at the fist of a screaming column of iron. I’ve watched friends die in droves on the eastern front and I’ve even, occasionally, used racist terms to refer to Japanese people while wielding a flamethrower.
I haven’t been there since the beginning. I hopped on the WW2 train after the first Wolfenstein game had left the station, beginning my career with a few forced games of Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. These indistinct dogfighting blobs, fighting for such high stakes, symbolizing so much with such little effort, were my first experience with World War 2 games in general.
So perhaps they’re to blame for my sustained interest in the subject matter, my feverish consumption of any documentary on the war, even if its veracity is highly suspect. Perhaps it’s Lucasarts’ fault, as it so often is, that I didn’t get tired of killing Nazis between Battlefield: 1942 and the first Call of Duty. But after the Call of Duty series hit its fourth World War 2 oriented episode and Battlefield went the way of DLC the state of the subject matter should seem pretty grim to any but the most pie-eyed enthusiast.
Which is why I was so shocked to be so excited about Company of Heroes.
An oft overlooked, buggy, finicky, poor selling, oddly balanced and chronically mismanaged game, Company of Heroes is one of the few World War 2 games which does not put you “in the boots” of a solider at some point during the war, but instead asks you to act as a commander during it. Its tone, as a result, is quite different.
Where most World War 2 games are flippant celebrations of patriotism, Company of Heroes seems to be almost obsessed with the loss of life associated with the conflict, the horror that the sides visited upon one another and the inhumanity necessary to facilitate violence on such a grand scale. From the opening cutscene, which entreats you to watch wave after wave of the troops you’ll soon be controlling die futilely for the sake of an inept strategy.
Even when “my boys” hit the beach and I had to guide them to the shore it was less a matter of carefully moving my troops through a puzzle-landscape and more a matter of running them madly across the beach, hoping that at least some of them would make it. It was surprisingly easy to get them all across, even if most of them did end their careers in the water instead of on the front line. And without any sort of autosave functions it was readily apparent what kind of game this would be: the kind where shit happened and you dealt with it. It was a game about the brutal reality of war and the necessity of operating within the limitations of that brutality if you wanted to succeed.
It wasn’t a game about honor or glory, about being better than your enemy. It was a game about a terrible conflict with real reprecussions, and it was a game that aspired to do the people who fought in that war so long ago some sort of justice. I’m not trying to oversell the game, or saying that it was overwhelmingly successful. It still has a lot of the problems that other World War 2 games have had throughout the years. But even if the Abrams tanks don’t act like flaming coffins, even if paratroopers leap into combat constantly, mid-firefight, and even if flamethrowers are quite infrequently deployed and, at best, sanitized in the portrayal of the violence they visited upon their victims, Company of Heroes still knows that the sheer loss of life that came during World War 2 was nothing to make light of.
And it wants to show us, respectfully, that both sides of the conflict were both myriad, human and extremely mortal. Your units, instead of the gruff, noble stand ins from Band of Brothers we usually get, best resemble actual people. They’re scared, they joke, they laugh, they insult one another and, just as often as not, they’re huge dicks. They say stupid things, insult each other moments before their deaths and, occasionally, just act like merciless killers doing all they can to put fear into the hearts of their enemies on the battlefield. And they’re also vulnerable, unprofessional men who miss their homes.
The unit patter that broadcasts from my toy-soldiers in Company of Heroes is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Starcraft has some self-aware humor and generic tough guy statements that I’m sure their tween target audience finds enthralling inserted in there. Dawn of War has an assortment of religious statements that bombard anyone with ears every time a unit is told to attack move. Civilization has that unintelligible drivel that your various AI friends spout with every click. The Sims have simlish, or whatever it is. So I’m not just saying that Company of Heroes has unique unit patter with its own tone and candor.
It has unit patter that makes the units seem like actual people. They whine, they make statements of realistic false bravado, they curse. Apparently someone in one of my squads trips a lot, because one of his buddies gives him shit about tying his shoes. Apparently my sniper has social problems, because he just whispers rhymes all the time to himself. Apparently my mortar team doesn’t get much of a break, because they’re always shouting. These examples and jokes don’t do the writing justice. In a genre where shit writing is par for the course Company of Heroes makes a great attempt, and mostly succeeds, and it does so in the service of its overarching theme.
Maybe that’s why I like it so much: its adherence to theme. Sure, it’s far from perfect, and as a multiplayer game, good as it is, I prefer Dawn of War’s unique sides, highly specialized units and fantastic setting. But as a game it made me do something I didn’t think I’d ever do again: get excited about World War II. And if it does that by making the entire thing seem more real, by making the people who fought in it seem more like real people and making the loss of life that the war took that much more apparent, well then bully on them for doing so.
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