company of heroes tales of valor new units

'You sacrifice the amount of units you can control for having really superb control over one squad.' Lumbering around in the tank is fun, and even with direct control enabled, with narrow pathways to squeeze through and enemies attacking from all sides, it delivers a satisfyingly tense impression of your best guess as what it would be like to manoeuvre one of these powerful beasts around a town in the heat of battle. 'Its strengths are balanced out by its weaknesses,' he reckons. On a flamethrower? Absolutely.' If you're worrying about it making the game too easy, there's a yang to the yin. Degnan continues: 'Where does it make sense? On a bazooka? Sure, why not. And this will be employed elsewhere in the game. In the Tiger Ace mission it transforms the way you play: with full control over the direction and timing of fire, you can pick off targets almost as if you're playing a third-person action game. You don't have to use direct control, but you'd be daft not to. That's really what it's all about: taking the visceral control and putting it right in the player's hands where it belongs.'

'The idea behind this is something that's been looked at in a bunch of other games where they look to take the army combat of an RTS and mix it with the direct control of first-person shooters. 'Controlling an army is a lot of fun, but what about controlling just one or two units?' asks Degnan. Since you're freed up from juggling the movements of a large number of units, Relic has had a bit of a fiddle with the mechanics, too.

Company of heroes tales of valor new units