Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Platform	Windows XP
List Price	$29.99
	$19.99 (Save 33%)

Published by	THQ
Release date
ASIN	B000U850P2
Availability	Usually ships in 24 hours

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts is the next chapter in the groundbreaking real-time strategy franchise from critically-acclaimed studio Relic Entertainment. This stand-alone game features two unique armies with full-length campaigns. Players will experience fast-paced dynamics like never before, in two of the most brutal World War II campaigns ever fought. Take command of the tenacious British 2nd Army in the vicious battle for Caen, France, or lead the German Panzer Elite as they struggle to repel the largest airborne invasion in history. With two intensely cinematic campaigns, mission persistance, improved vehicle AI and weather effects that directly impact the battlefield, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts brings you a superbly realistic war experience like no other. This game supports DirectX 10 and is fully compatible with the original Company of Heroes. With this compatibility, you can wage war online with a total of four playable armies in the ultimate battle for Fortress Europe! DirectX 10 support for enhanced lighting effects and more realistic terrain details ESRB Rated M for Mature

Customer Reviews - courtesy of Amazon.com

Paranoid publisher

The first CoH is an awesome game, but this follow-up is a big disappointment. There is so much anti-piracy junk in the way of just playing the game. When I finally got all the patches downloaded, it won't take my key online because it says that it is already being used! And customer support is nowhere to be found. So now I can't play my game online and I can't return the game because it is already opened. I will *never* buy a game from THQ again.

Excellent

An excellent 2nd chapter to the original. Playing as the German defender lets you really understand the inundating allied forces. With the amount of troops and material at allied disposal it is surprising the amount of time the invasion to victory actually took.

The scenarios for the original game do not work well with this version. It is no challenge when you play the Germans, and it is impossible if you play as the US.

Good RTS, once patched

You really want both this and CoH. Then you can play 4 different teams, all different. This isn't an RTS where every side has the same basic tech. Each side play's fairly different. From the Panzer which have no defense, to the British that really like to turtle. This is a good LAN party game, as long as you patch...

works and plays great

After reading the reviews about the crashes and the instability I didn't have any problems at all just 10 minutes of updates and it was fine, it did exit but that was my anti virus the causing problems i have a 8800GT (nvidia) and the visuals and effects were AUSOME!!! no problems that would make me stop playing except being bad at the game all I know is that I didn't have the problems that were described so I'm happy.

Crashed and burned. Horrible tech support.

I bought this game after having really enjoyed the first CoH. It was a truly innovation on strategy games, no more silly minerals to mine! The first CoH had some minor technical issues but the company worked them out and got the game running just fine. So I decided to give CoH Opposing Fronts a try.

It was a total waste of time and money.

My machine was a month old top-of-the-line souped up laptop. 4 GB of RAM, dual core centrino, 512 MB of video. One would think that so much power would be enough to run a simple WWII game, right? Wrong!

I couldn't get the game to run, so after I jumped some hoops, downloaded about 700 MB of patches and followed complicated install-uninstall-reinstall sequences I got the game to finally run. Now I'm a senior software engineer and even I got frustrated by this, I can't even imagine what it would be like for the ocassional non-technical user.

The cinematic sequences ran truly slow and sometimes crashed the whole game, so I just pressed ESC when one of those popped up to avoid these crashes. Playing the German Campaign was OK, but sometimes it got really frustrating because I couldn't get my units moving in time to save the barracks or whatever because the game engine ran too slow!

Then the game just stopped working at all in the middle of the British Campaign. No matter what I tried, and I spent hours debugging the problem, the game would not advance, so I decided to contact Tech Support.

The guys at Tech Support demanded some files from the DirectX diagnostics tool, the game's log file and other information about my operating system. I guess they were trying to discourage me from further contact because their demands were extremelly hard for the non-technical user (ie. opening the game's debug console mid game) but since I had no problem getting this information so I sent it right away. Then they asked me for a few days while they looked into the issues.

A whole week passed and no response, so I decided to email them to see what was happening. To my surprise they didn't do anything with all the information I provided. So I asked again if they could look into it.

A few days later another tech support guy, an outsourced foreign guy I could barely understand, told me that my laptop wasn't on the supported list. Well of couse my laptop model wasn't on the list because it was a NEWER 2008 model! Then this dude just said "the game requirements were printed on the box previous to your purchase, sorry, no luck, no refund, bye bye"

I was truly polite, understanding, and helping right until the point they told me to stick it. But even after I escalated the issue, I got no response from them.

Lesson learned. I gave them some money, and they gave me a buggy game. No tech support whatsoever. I haven't bought anything from THQ since. There were some games I was interested for my PlayStation 3 but I didn't buy them because they were from THQ. They've lost about $680 right there! That $29.99 refund would make sense now wouldn't it?