Title: Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
Price: $29.99
Platform: PC
ESRB Rating: M for Mature
Score: 8.0 out of 10

Real time strategy games have been around for a long time now, and sometimes it feels like every imaginable setting and style that could be applied to such a game has been completely beaten to death. How does a developer innovate and keep things new and fresh when they're working in a genre that's often as unoriginal as it is stagnant? Every type of game has its own solutions to these problems, and developer Relic Entertainment seems to have stumbled upon a few of them. The second expansion to Company of Heroes, Tales of Valor livens up the real time strategy genre with some interesting innovations.

If you've played the original Company of Heroes or the first expansion Opposing Fronts, the gameplay in Tales of Valor is going to be mostly familiar to you. Things (for the most part) revolve around building a base, creating units, taking and holding resource points and finally crushing your enemy. This, of course, isn't usually as easy as it sounds.

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor is a stand-alone expansion pack, meaning that you don't need to own either of the previous games in order to play this one. If you do own one or both, however, the three new single player campaigns from Tales of Valor will link up seamlessly to your existing game installation. These new campaigns put the brightest spotlight on the game's biggest new feature: direct fire. Friendly units can be allowed to automatically move and shoot as you would expect a unit to behave in any other RTS game, but with direct fire you can take complete control of the unit in question, meaning there's no one to blame but yourself for bad aim. One campaign puts you in the commander's cupola of a German Tiger tank; another puts you in charge of two squads of American paratroopers. The fairly light story elements behind these men and the feel you get from directly controlling them adds a lot more character and depth to the units. Unfortunately, there's rarely ever a sense of danger in regards to your men, considering that reviving them is something you can do indefinitely at the press of a button.

The story and voice acting is, as always with this series, top notch. I was rather disappointed at the incredibly short length of all of the new campaigns (only about three missions each), but they're fun while they last. There's also new sound effects (they also patch into the other games in the series) that are absolutely awesome. Artillery barrages sound like an avalanche crashing down from the sky, rifle fire echoes down city streets, machine guns stutter in the distance, men scream and swear as their trenches come under fire. It's nearly a perfect aural experience, making you feel like you're in one of the most realistic World War II movies ever made.

Multiplayer is where most of the other innovations can be found. New game modes allow players to work together to fight off ever increasing hordes of AI attackers, while another feels almost like a demolition derby with tanks. I found all of the new modes to be fun in different ways, but always entertaining as long as your human allies have some inkling of what they're doing. The other major new feature here is the inclusion of units that can replace many of the existing weapons in your arsenal. Units such as the M18 Hellcat or Hotchkiss H35 can be swapped in to replace certain equipment before the beginning of a match, adding yet another layer of strategy in which you'll have to second guess your opponent's armament choices.

One downside to the release of Tales of Valor are the new bugs that the expansion has introduced into the previous games. While I haven't experienced many of them first hand, the general consensus seems to be that Relic's wonderfully tuned unit balance has been somewhat upset by all the new content, throwing veteran multiplayer fans for a bit of a loop. The Company of Heroes team has yet to let their fans down though, and if past is prologue then we can look forward to a patch to address many of these issues before long.

As great of a game as Tales of Valor is, you might want to wait for a price drop before pulling the trigger on this one. Fans of the series will undoubtedly want to get it right off the bat, but when you really break down the amount of content contained inside this expansion I'm not sure it's entirely worth the thirty dollar price tag. Checking out one of the previous (and by this time cheaper) installments in the series might be a wise first step for newcomers. It's not the Eastern Front expansion that I and many other Company of Heroes fans were looking for, but it's still a solid addition to a great series.