Review by: Tony Mitera

Tales of Valor is the newest expansion for the highly regarded World War II RTSCompany of Heroes and brings new units, maps, and features to the table. However, while the quality of the content is just as high, the expansion does have a noticeably lesser amount of it than the previous expansion. Simply put, players looking for more deep and involved campaigns won’t find any new material this time around.

The three new campaigns are each appealing; they just lack length. The first campaign follows the battles of a German Tiger tank combating Allied forces in a village on the European front, while the second campaign chronicles the actions of a few squads of paratroopers who dropped behind enemy lines to take and hold a causeway the day after D-Day. The third and final campaign shows the German war machine in full retreat near the end of the war, fighting to hold and secure a village long enough to allow retreating German soldiers to make it through.

Each campaign only takes place on one map, broken up into three different missions. For example, in the first mission of the American campaign you fight to get to the causeway, while in the second you are building a bridgehead on the far side and trying to hold it for as long as you can. This is no different than the stock campaigns in which a single map hosts multiple missions back to back, but the difference here is that these single maps make up entire campaigns which themselves only last less than an hour or so each.

The expansion adds some new gameplay features, one of the more intriguing being the ability to directly control units. When directly controlling a tank for instance the right mouse button still handles vehicle movement commands as normal, while the cursor itself changes to a crosshair with a series of bars around it in a circle. Clicking the left mouse button fires the tank’s main cannon, at which point the bars disappear and fill back up to show how long before you can fire again. Units under direct control reload faster and have higher accuracy, so it can give you a significant advantage. While not all units can be controlled in this manner—many can and with varying results. While emplaced weapons and artillery are a natural fit, squads of infantry come across as almost weaker when directly controlled.