Company of Heroes is a visually stunning real-time strategy game that depicts all the violent chaos of World War II with uncommon intensity. Set during the invasion of Normandy toward the end of the war, Company of Heroes takes its cues from Saving Private Ryan, by portraying both the sheer brutality of the war as well as the humanity of its combatants. Many other recent WWII games have also drawn influence from Steven Spielberg's landmark film, but Company of Heroes is even more graphic. This and the game's highly authentic-looking presentation are its distinguishing features, and it boasts some frantic, well-designed strategic and tactical combat to match. Company of Heroes trades a wide breadth of content for an extremely detailed look at WWII-era ground combat, and its action is so fast paced that it's best suited for the reflexes of an experienced RTS player. So if you're unfazed by any of that, you'll find that this latest real-time strategy game from the developers of Homeworld and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is one of the best, most dramatic and exciting examples in years. Provided you have a powerful-enough system and graphics card to fully appreciate the visuals in Company of Heroes, you'll quickly be struck by the level of detail depicted in the game. Infantry move in teams, darting from cover to cover. They may be ordered to occupy any building on the map, and you'll see them shutter the doors and take aim out the windows. Vehicles are shown to scale, so tanks and other armored vehicles look big and imposing, and, indeed, they are. Infantry seem almost helpless against tanks, and you'll hear the men screaming as tank shells explode around them, sending bodies flying, while lucky survivors dive out of the way. Yet by attacking a tank's vulnerable sides and rear armor with explosives, it's possible to turn the tables on these lumbering threats...turning one of the most basic confrontations in Company of Heroes into a thrilling cat-and-mouse game, much more than a typical clash between a couple of RTS units. What's more, the battlefields themselves have at least as much character to them as the various infantry squads and vehicles as your disposal. The quaint French towns that are the set pieces of many of the game's skirmishes truly look as if a war was waged there once the battle is done, since buildings will catch fire and collapse, telephone lines will topple, blackened craters will appear in the wake of artillery blasts, and more. These changes aren't just cosmetic, either. Those blast craters provide cover for your infantry, while the ruined husks of blown-up tanks might interfere with a machine gunner's line of fire. The game focuses on the Allies' invasion of German-occupied Normandy in 1944, specifically on close-quarters skirmishes between infantry and armor. Company of Heroes presents a number of novel twists to real-time strategy conventions, but at heart this game works like other RTS games do, by putting you in charge of base construction, resource gathering, and tactical command of various military forces in an effort to defeat the opposition. The game includes a good-sized single-player campaign spanning more than a dozen missions, in which Able Company lands on Omaha Beach on D-Day, liberates a number of key towns and strategic points, disrupts German supply lines and secret weapons, and finally helps crush the remnants of the Nazi war machine in France. It's an exciting campaign, tied together with cutscenes and mission briefings coming from a variety of voices, which creates a few threads that help tie the missions together. In addition to the campaign, you can play skirmish matches with up to seven computer-controlled players on a series of different maps, and you can also jump online into the proprietary Relic Online service to challenge other players in ranked and unranked matches. The Relic Online service is a cut above most similar offerings, and lets you easily find a ranked match against players of similar skill or host a match with your own custom settings. Because of its limited scope of the Second World War, Company of Heroes has only the two playable factions, which it calls the Allies and the Axis--but really they're the Americans and the Germans. In the campaign, you always play as forces from Able Company and you're always fighting the Germans. There isn't a separate campaign from the German perspective, though the Axis faction is fully playable in skirmish matches and online, and turns out to be fairly different from the Allies despite the basic similarities between the two sides' weaponry. In fact, in a strange departure from similar games, Company of Heroes always forces you to play Allies versus Axis, even in multiplayer matches. Matches with more than two players are always team-based, with one side as the Allies and the other as the Axis, and so forth. While the game's units and battlefields are unusually detailed, it's hard not to wish for additional playable factions and a greater variety of settings, especially given how well Company of Heroes handles the American and German sides.

The gameplay in Company of Heroes is all about frontline combat, and forces you to quickly explore the map. You typically start out with a headquarters and a squad of engineers, who can build structures and setup defenses. Maps are divided up into territories that all have a resource point in them, and the resources you'll need are manpower, munitions, and fuel. Infantry may capture neutral or enemy resource points, causing them to indefinitely contribute a flow of the given resource to your military efforts while also increasing the total number of units you can have in your army. However, all your territories must be connected for the resource flow to continue unabated; if an enemy takes a key territory, this may cut off your supply lines. All resources are used for building more-advanced structures and vehicles, but you only need manpower for basic infantry, who may use special abilities like hand grenades or armor-piercing machine gun rounds for a one-time cost of munitions. Munitions may also be spent to upgrade individual squads with special weapons, like recoilless rifles useful against enemy armor, or Browning automatic rifles that can suppress opposing squads. Your infantry squads are highly resourceful, acting as single units that can be effective down to the last man. They'll last much longer when attacking from behind cover, such as a row of sandbags or the bell tower of an abandoned church.

 2002's Conflict: Desert Storm gave players squad-based tactical action with a tie-in to modern military history. As you'd gather from the name, the game was set in the Middle East during the early 1990s' Operation: Desert Storm--the famed military action against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Its current-events context notwithstanding, the first Conflict just wasn't very good. Just a year and a half later, we've received a direct sequel titled Conflict: Desert Storm II. The hasty release of a follow-up was no doubt spurred by the political and military events of the last year. However, the new Conflict is quite an improvement over the extremely shaky first game. Though there's been a more recent conflict in Iraq, and military action in the region is, in fact, ongoing, Conflict: Desert Storm II again places you in the thick of the 1991 campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime. There's not a whole lot of story to speak of in the game. You get a linear progression of 10 missions, each of which has its own setting and unique mission objectives and some of which are revealed in-game as you progress. You command a squad of four specialists in each mission, and, at the beginning of a new game, you can choose either American Delta Force or British SAS personnel. Your selection here slightly affects stats, appearance, and voice acting. Each of your team members is equipped with a weapon that gives him a unique function. There's the assault rifle-wielding team leader, the sniper, the demolitions expert, and the heavy machine gunner. The team members do have actual names and unique appearances, so you've got at least a little more attachment to them than if they were just faceless drones.The core squad and combat mechanics in Desert Storm II are a little awkward at the outset, but with some practice you can get fairly proficient at playing the game. In the main single-player game, you can switch between your four teammates by hitting up and down on the D pad. Each of the four (whichever one is active) squad members can issue individual or group orders to the others by using a number of button combinations. You can tell your teammates to hold position or form up behind you, hit the dirt, advance on the enemy and fire at will, and so on. As long as you keep tabs on your teammates' health and actively switch between them regularly, you can progress through the game's missions without worrying too much about suffering casualties. Leaving three of your buddies in the care of the game's squad AI isn't the best idea, though at least they'll be proactive about fighting enemies. They'll fire at their enemies but will often get themselves killed in the process. Of course, you can issue orders to bring them back behind cover, but that can be difficult when you're in the middle of a firefight and are worrying about saving your own skin. Overall, it would have been nice if the teammate AI was a little more adaptive when left to its own devices.

The actual fighting in Conflict: Desert Storm II is somewhat hit-and-miss. At times, it feels pretty solid, thanks in large part to a built-in auto-aim feature that makes it quite easy to target hostile forces. In fact, sometimes it's a little too easy--the game will sometimes line up an enemy in your sights before you even realize he's there. Other times, though, it seems suspiciously difficult to score a hit on enemies, particularly with the sniper rifle. It's possible to hit the deck, steady your crosshairs directly over an enemy's head, and then see no effect after pulling the trigger. It's frustrating, to be sure, but, for the most part, the combat is reasonably well-balanced and entertaining. You can even engage in vehicular combat with a jeep or tank in some missions, which does break up the flow of things a little. The vehicles feel a little awkward and can be slow to respond to your controller movements, though Graphically, Conflict: Desert Storm II gets the job done but does it in a no-frills sort of way. The backgrounds are fairly devoid of detail, and the enemy character models look pretty simple. Your own squad models, however, are decent-looking. The game, thankfully, runs pretty smoothly on the GameCube and doesn't present any serious frame rate hitches. The audio portion of the game is dominated by a lot of yelling, gunfire, and explosions, though all of these are rendered pretty well. The music tends to fade into the background, though, since you're intent on finishing your missions. Finally, as in the original game, the voice acting for the training mode's drill instructor is a poor attempt at sounding like Full Metal Jacket's tough-as-nails drill instructor, and it comes across as pretty awful.

In the final analysis, Conflict: Desert Storm II isn't without problems, but it's not the worst squad-based game you'll ever play, and it's decidedly improved over the original game. If the game does float your boat, there's unfortunately not a lot of replay value. You can play through the game again cooperatively if you're so inclined, but there's no competitive multiplayer component to speak of. If you're really into squad-based military action games, Desert Storm II might be worth a look to tide you over until something else comes along.

A solid port is nothing to scoff at. Prototype 2 finally makes its way to the PC after

debuting on the xbox 360 and play station 3 back in April, and the transition has been kind to this brutal open-world adventure. The biggest difference between this version and its console brethren is the slightly improved visuals. Greater draw distance and a higher frame rate showcase your murderous rampage in a more impressive light. Because the technical aspects have been translated with nary a hitch, it's easy to lose yourself in the destructive glee of this unrepentant sequel. Prototype 2 isn't the least bit novel, but it's so utterly ridiculous that it's hard to wipe the smile from your face. One thing you should keep in mind is that Prototype 2 is at its best with a controller. The fast-paced fighting and empowering exploration come together seamlessly when you have a couple of analog sticks and responsive buttons. If you're using a keyboard, you can still blow through the papier-mache enemies, but the actions don't play out as smoothly. Holding down three keys to glide through the city takes a bit of finger gymnastics, and zeroing in on one attacker in a crowd is even tougher with a mouse. It's easy enough to get used to these quirks with a little practice, but Prototype 2 doesn't feel as as natural with a keyboard and mouse.

In contrast to the devil-may-care attitude showcased in the majority of the adventure, the story does take itself seriously. A military force has quarantined a major metropolis under the guise of protecting citizens from a viral outbreak, but their occupancy is far from altruistic. In reality, they are conducting bioweapon research, and the people are just unlucky cattle being led to slaughter. It's a morbid situation that makes it satisfying to kill your opposition--defense contractor Blackwatch--as you hunt down the higher-ups who ordered this atrocity.

The initial rush you feel when the central plot comes into focus dissipates as you learn more about the conspiracy. Evil stereotypes permeate the cast of characters, but even though there's proper motivation to murder them all, you rarely feel as if you understand whom you're tracking down. Scenes of redemption toward the end of the story breathe life into some of these individuals, but by that point you won't even care what happens to the villains. While character development is lacking, the storytelling is interesting. Most of the dirty details surface when you consume certain people, and the flashes of memory piece together a terrifying puzzle about the inner machinations of power-obsessed heretics who rarely question their horrific actions. Dialogue-rich sequences explain your objectives before each mission. Plentiful swearing and unrestrained anger highlight most of these conversations, and the vulgar cutscenes force the carefree action to take a backseat far too often. Furthermore, protagonist James Heller holds his hand to his ear and slowly walks around when a contact talks to him, contrasting wildly with the crazed sprinting and leaping that make up his normal locomotion. Problems with the story aside, the artistic style used in the many cutscenes is certainly eye-catching. High-contrast black and white with flashes of color (blue eyes, red flames) add a dramatic pitch to the proceedings. This style is also used when your health gets low in combat and does a great job of communicating your struggles without obscuring your view.

Prototype 2 takes place in an open-world environment where you can run wherever you wish without artificial barriers reining you in. From the moment you're set loose, you don't need any urging to sprint through this city gone to ruin. Movement is free-flowing and empowering. Running up the sides of buildings, bounding down blocks in a single leap, and gliding like a manic flying squirrel make for quicker transport than a tired vehicle ever could, and the unabashed joy of careening through this virus-plagued town is hard to deny. Things do become a little tricky when precision is necessary, though thankfully you rarely have to move with exactitude. Instead, you sprint pell-mell until you crave the sweet satiation of your bloodthirst, and in a snap you're beating a poor sucker so badly his mother wouldn't be able to recognize him. The convergence of movement and combat makes for instances of unrepentant brutality. While gliding over occupied streets, you might spy a fear-mongering soldier down below. Lock on to him from your safe vantage in the sky, and with a tap of a button, grab his squirming body before he has a chance to scream for help. With one more tap of a button, you can pound him into the unforgiving cement, hurl him into his fellow troops, or infect him with a viral bomb that causes him to explode in a fountain of blood, and then flee from the scene as if you were never there. And you can enjoy this game…

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