This kind of refinement typifies the Company of Heroes 2 experience. Since you no longer need to fight over specific resource points to facilitate your strategy of choice, you'll find that battles take up a lot more of the map than in CoH1, where fighting always broke out over the same vital sectors. You can stack fuel to tech up and focus on vehicles, or hoard munitions to buy upgrades and call in off-map support more often. Instead, simply being physically present within the capture radius suffices, allowing for real firefights to be fought while grabbing new territory.Īdditionally, you can build ammo or fuel depots on pretty much any capture point, granting you more direct control of your economy. Infantry units are no longer tied up at the center of the territory they're capturing. Possibly the least talked about, but most impactful difference, is in how resource points are handled. This is where all the tweaks and additions show their true value, and while no one thing stands out too much, the sum of all the changes is notable. However, the best place for all those pieces to come together is still the multiplayer skirmishes. The variety is impressive too, showcasing the many moving parts, both old and new, that give the franchise the depth for which it's known. You know you're in for a grim ride when you're being tasked to destroy your own buildings and equipment while setting fire to your own fields, burning friend and foe alive at once. Heck, the first three missions essentially have you throwing conscripted corpses-to-be to their deaths by the truckload just to stave off capture or total defeat. The Eastern Front was bloody, bloody business indeed, and even when I “succeeded” in my missions it was hard to stave off the feeling that I had actually lost. In battle, Company of Heroes 2 is the genuine article, but off the field, it feels more like a cheap imitation.īut if that sounds harsh, it's only because the gameplay side of the lengthy campaign is so well executed that the story's presentation is so disappointing. The over-saturated color schemes of the character's uniforms clash terribly with the muted battlefields they stand upon, and their clumsy animations soundly defeat all my attempts to become immersed in the tale being told. It's just a shame that the cutscenes filling in the blanks between sorties fall so short of the bar set by the campaign's best moments. Excellent animations and an absolutely killer sound package come together beautifully to make the more pitched missions feel overwhelming during their climaxes. The chaos of war is all too real at moments, with the relentless cacophony of artillery barrages assaulting your ears as you watch scads of Russian conscripts get chopped mercilessly down by MG fire. Scripted events and in-engine storytelling were a strong point of the original, and the same holds true here. It takes some serious narrative barrel-rolling to garner any emotional investment out of a war between two of history's greatest military powers, but Relic manages as well as can be imagined by hinging it all on the grit, determination, and sacrifice of the millions of brave Russian soldiers whose blood ultimately paid for the Allied victory wholesale. Don't get me wrong, there's a new game here -a great one at that -but while its new concepts and features mostly represent steps in the right direction, they're still small steps ones that don't quite reflect the seven years that have passed since the original lit a fire under the genre's collective ass.ĬoH2's opening salvo is a 14-mission campaign that tells the tale of World War II's Eastern front from the perspective of the embattled Soviet Union. Company of Heroes 2's biggest successes and failures both rest upon its commitment to replicating the excellence of its predecessor faithfully, almost too much so.
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