Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (DVD-ROM)

if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That seemed to be the mantra of developer Relic Entertainment when it made Opposing Fronts, the just-as-intense followup to the Company Of Heroes (COH) real-time strategy blockbuster last year. You'll find yourself frantically clicking to lo artillery shells at a never-ending swamp of enemy tanks and soldiers. There's also the same unpredictable landscape: your soldiers can hide inside bombed-out craters and tanks can smash through buildings and enemies inside. This time, you command German and British forces in European campaigns in World War II. In the original, you clicked on American GIs. For COH veterans, the German campaign played on "Normal" difficulty may be easier than the British one. The reason's simple: the Germans had the best tanks. The Allies won the war partly because their planes bombed fearsome German tanks, like the Jadgpanther, into oblivion. But in Opposing Fronts, with the Nazi war machine in your hands, you can easily wreck havoc on British commandos armed with little more than the occasional anti-tank weapon. In one of the earlier missions in Operation Market Garden - a historic Allied assault that failed - I had much fun whacking the poor commandos with incendiary, mortar shells. The sight of the commandos on fire are - I must say - pretty cool to look at given the game's souped-up graphics.

For something more challenging, try playing the British campaign to liberate the French city of Caen. Here, you have under your command those poor commandos you may have gotten used to frying. And for tanks, you get light ones like the Stuart, which are really good only for whacking infantry and light armoured vehicles. Against heavy German tanks, any Allied tank, including heavies like the Sherman Firefly, is no match. All this is why Opposing Fronts is so intense. The action is relentless. It helps that most of the levels are well-designed, taking you from street fighting in a French city to epic tank battles in th Dutch countryside. My only complaint is with a British mission where I was "funnelled" into a linear assault on enemy positions because my tanks had to cross several bridges. There's also a bug: if you wipe out all the Nazis without sending your tanks into an earlier ambush, you'll fail the mission. Fortunately, these problems do not take away much from the immersive experience. Helped by prettier DirectX 10 graphics that produce spectacular light shows with every explosion, the game keeps you stuck on your seat for hours.