In Company of Heroes every man matters. The new real-time strategy game for the PC walks a well-trodden road, recreating the storming of the beaches of Normandy, the liberation of Carentan, and the eventual ouster of Axis forces from France.

Unlike the latest crop of obligatory WW2 games, Company of Heroes is not a first-person shooter. Instead, you control individual units all the way from six-man rifleman teams to Sherman tanks with a top-down camera, telling them what to do and where to do it with mouse clicks on the map instead of controlling the action yourself. (If you’ve played Starcraft or one of the Age of… games, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

What sets Company of Heroes apart from other real-time strategy games, set in WW2 or otherwise, is that the little men running around the French countryside feel intimate and valuable. The game encourages you to keep units alive, not just with an easy “retreat” button that sends them scrambling back to your base, but with an experience point system that rewards keeping a squad alive.

More than that, though, is the way that each unit of men tries to stay alive, hunkering down in the craters left from artillery fire and desperately crying out to their commander—you—”We’re getting fuckin’ murdered out here!” The gameplay is also balanced in such a way that somewhat authentic tactics, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of WW2 movies, keep the infantry in play; Once tanks have been researched, you’ll still often want to use armor to support infantry incursions to grab new territory.

If you’re looking for an accurate simulation, Company of Heroes is not perfect (although it does a surprisingly good job of feeling like a simulation, which is admirable). Unlike games with a heavy plot that try to recreate the experiences of movies like Band of Brothers, Company of Heroes instead offers up natural scenarios as organic results of the gameplay.

That makes no sense; Let me give you an example.

What matters more to you: A in-game movie explaining that a squad of Rangers has been trapped in a building and must be rescued, or a squad of Rangers pinned down because you ordered them to hold the line? Company of Heroes makes you care about your little guys, even as they’re being blown to bits by machine gun emplacements, artillery, and even tiny snipers.

Give it a whirl. It’s a game so good that I can suggest it to almost everybody, even those who don’t normally play games. Oh, and it’s flippin’ gorgeous, too. Don’t even get me started.

Oh, about the title: Band of Brothers fans will probably remember Dick Winters’ quoting a letter from Mike Ranney at the end of the series, “‘Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?’ Ranney said, ‘No, but I served in a company of heroes.’”

Game Web Site [CompanyOfHeroesGame.com]