Link is here:
http://www.companyofheroes.com/What it is: It's Company of Heroes, the award winning unbalanced WW2 RTS with fantastic atmosphere, but "free-to-play". So, what this means is you can theoretically play the game for free. Emphasis on the word theoretically. I wish I could find a post I made long ago on why free-to-pay games tend to actually be scams (with some exceptions), but I can't... oh well.
Impressions:I like Company of Heroes. I still play it. But this, I can't stand this. See, what they do is you only get 4 character slots like an MMO. Each character is limited to a single tech tree in the game. In the original Company of Heroes, you could use whatever tech tree you wanted depending on the situation and your mood. Here you are limited to essentially 4 character classes. "That's not so bad", the layman might think. "There's only 6 classes in the game right now".
Hah.
Leveling system:This game makes you spend an unearthly amount of time to level up your characters. Not to mention you start off extremely bad. I'm a damn good Company of Heroes player, and I can usually work with some sane limitations. But if the game developers expect me and other newbies to FAIRLY square off against another player when all the starting player has is ONE or TWO (These are the most goddamn important parts of the entire character class) support skills at the very, very crappiest level (we're talking... so useless at base level that they barely even make themselves known).... the developers are insane. This is the same as say if in Starcraft, you were forced to fight other players with only one or two special skills total for your units. "Okay," so the layman thinks. "So I just endure some terrible newbie grinding for a few days or weeks (ugh) and get to the point where I can actually do stuff".
Here's where I get really irritated at this system. This is an RTS. So you invest all your time into ONE.... SINGLE.... STRATEGY... I don't know about you guys, but I get bored of doing the same thing with the same units after the... oh I don't know.... third time? I don't want to play the same goddamn class for days or weeks in an RTS! To borrow a Starcraft analogy again, not only would you have to choose only one race to "level up", say.... Terran, you were forced to do the same goddamn bunker rush forever. That sucks.
The way the system is set up is that all your progress is locked to each individual character. If you want to try something new, you have to go through all that grinding (in a goddamn RTS...) just to get it useful. Repeat that for all 6 of the current classes and all 12 of the future classes. Whee, sounds like fun...
Heroes and items:The game introduces hero units and items to the game. Generally speaking, from what I've seen so far, they're kinda meh-ish. Generally, they do things like increase a unit's hp by 5% or increase accuracy by 8% or the like. I guess again, theoretically, you could amass a collection of item cards which boost one single unit type so much that it's unstoppable but you'd either need the grinding skills of a 16th century miller or a father's credit card. Hero units are a slightly bit more powerful, in that they generally cost the same as the regular unit (though you can only call them in once) but are in every way more superior (though only slightly). Not everyone has the same hero units and while you can theoretically earn them through regular gameplay... hahahaha... yeah...
In any case, that's not a big issue. While if players are evenly skilled, the one with the better cards will probably win, that's probably not going to happen in any Company of Heroes game. You're either going to get steamrolled or not, no in-betweens in this game. So I don't really mind them.
What I do mind is the fact that just like other similarly crafty (read: evil) free-to-play games, each of these item and hero cards have "charges". Which means you can only use them a certain amount before you have to recharge them. These charges aren't very lengthy either, with most hero units having enough chargers for 10 games and regular items for about 5. Again, you could theoretically charge them with more gametime.... but I'm sure you see what I'm getting at here.
As you can probably tell, I don't have kind words for this release. As someone who actually owns the game, I probably will never want to play this again. I have no interest whatsoever in grinding in an RTS just to be able to play decently nor would I ever pay money when I actually own a full version of the game with everything unlocked. It's practically the same game, except some of the support abilities have been modified.
Allow me the liberty to predict the fate of anyone who plays this, since it'll be exactly the same as the fate of people who played Iron Realm games or Korean FTP games or Chinese MMOs: Anyone who doesn't buy stuff will, for a short time, have lots of fun but end up working ridiculously hard and spend too much time to be mediocre; while anyone who pays exorbitant amounts will have a small amount of fun at first only to be disappointed later. So I would conclude by advising anyone interested in this to perhaps... try it out as a demo or play the single player, which comes full in the release (which is really nice) and if you like it: buy the game with all three expansions on Steam for $12.
What do you think? Am I insane for dissing this game so badly? Try it out (it is technically free) and post your comments here as well.
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Topic: Company of Heroes Online Open Beta and more reason why I hate free to play (Read 3257 times)