Causeway puts you in control of US troops in the hours following D-Day, battling to secure a vital bridge. Tiger Ace follows a single German Panzer crew as they help capture a French town. So what, exactly, are you buying in Tales of Valor? "Three new single player campaigns!" shouts the instruction manual with boyish enthusiasm, but since each only features three missions, the word "campaign" seems an overstatement. It's still here, it's still deadly serious, it's still at the mercy of the rather flaky Relic Online system, but at least they've not replaced anything with a quick time event. The resource management, the base building, the push to capture strategic points and form supply lines through hostile territory. The core multiplayer component, the bit that made fans gasp and shriek with glee, is much as it's always been. Tales of Valor's curious construction makes it hard to really get a firm grasp on what its purpose is supposed to be. Has the 10/10 titan of wartime RTS fallen prey to the dreaded dumbing down?
Fans of this meatiest of strategy challenges therefore can't help but have shivered a little when designer Chris Degnan told us that there was "a drive to make a more casual, friendly experience" for Tales of Valor. Change things too much and you lose whatever it was that made people go gooey to start with. One of the finest RTS games of the last few years, it rose above the herd of similar World War 2 strategy titles and showed that veteran Canadian developer Relic wasn't about to live up to its name.īut when you've got a game that's been so universally acclaimed, where do you take it next? Keep churning out the same stuff and you risk familiarity curdling into contempt. It's clearly not a sequel, but then its slim pickings don't do all that much to expand the game either.Ĭompany of Heroes, of course, was and still is absolutely ace, coaxing top marks from the mercurial Mr Gillen back in 2006.
Is it just me, or is that something of an oxymoron? How can you expand something if you don't even need to own the original thing in the first place? It's a particularly pertinent question as far as the new Company of Heroes disc is concerned, since this standalone package doesn't really offer much in the way of new content.
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