Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts again.

When I play this game I can't believe that I have still not bought or played CoH Tales of Valour.

This is a link to a previous entry I made about this game:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/company-of-heroes-opposing-fronts.html

Since I bought the new PC, even though I have signed back in to the same Relic account, I cannot continue the campaign from where I left off, which was near the end, and I have to start from the beginning.  It doesn't seem too much like a chore as I can only remember it vaguely, though there are one or two battles which I remember as being a real pain.  I am definitely playing better than I did first time round.

A burning house in St Lo

The game is beautifully made with a lot of thought put into it.  The fact that even when I get hammered I don't feel hard done by makes me think that things are always working how they should and I am being given every chance to win, if only I wasn't such an idiot.

It would make the game more interesting if I did not play so slowly.  Some of the initial battles are almost unloseable, but it might still take me an hour to get around to making a serious assault on an enemy base, only to discover that it is actually quite vulnerable, and the enemy only seemed strong because the AI had taken a lot of territory and attacked my base boldly with almost everything it had.

There will be more of this played in the near future and I will be looking out for Tales of Valour in forthcoming Steam sales.

Resistance: Fall of Man

This is a Playstation only shooter and for £4.21 on ebay was a fantastic buy.

It is set in the UK.  Most of the soldiers our hero fights alongside are Brits but our hero is, of course, American:  the yanks come to our rescue in a game again - what a surprise.  Never mind, story and character rightly take second place to excellent shooting action.

The enemies are the Chimera.  I'm not completely sure as to whether there is an extra-planetary influence at work, but I think that an infection turns humans into the humanoid type of this creature.  However, there are other kinds which are not at all human and which we see hatch from eggs at one stage.  I should probably pay more attention.

Explosions!

Visually, as the pictures show, the game tries to be in keeping with it's era.  It is set in the early 50s and the colour is largely washed out of the game world, leaving a gloomy but effective, sepia tinted look.

The very first part of the game was tough and I kept dying but after a short time two important things happened.  Firstly, I earned a skill point and after that any of the health bars (bottom right of the first picture), which were partially reduced would refill after a short pause without damage.  Secondly, I started to find health restoring serum about the game-world.  Playing on Medium difficulty, serum and ammo are both scattered very liberally and I have only had one low ammo crisis.

I played through the game for quite a while, including a whole section set in Grimsby, without a single death.  There was then a section set in Manchester and the difficulty level increased a bit but the first couple of deaths I experienced were still mainly down to my stupidity.

A not bad representation of Manchester Cathedral.

On reaching Manchester Cathedral the game gets harder still and death goes back to being an occasional feature of it (if you're me).  There are still plentiful supplies of the necessary equipment for survival, though.

So far new weapons and enemies have been introduced throughout and this has kept the game interesting and extremely playable.