Company of Heroes 2 Review (PC)

  My anti-tank squad is hunkered down behind a wooden fence. They're pinned down by heavy machine gun fire originating directly in front, preventing them from peppering the medium German tank to their right with RPGs. A few feet ahead of them is a structure where they could find temporary shelter, but making a break for it would be suicide. To make matters worse, they are freezing to death. Too long in the harsh winter away from a warming fire or holed up inside a bunker and they'll start dropping like flies. An AT shell penetrates the vulnerable rear of the Nazi tank; my heavy AT gunners have finally finished turning their confiscated weapon toward the enemy. As the German treads whirl to face the new threat and the heavy machine gunners move to support it, my anti-tank squad takes the opportunity to hop the fence and makes it safely inside the house. RPG fire soon whizzes from the broken windows, striking the Axis armor. The tank is almost destroyed, but my AT gunners are getting cut down, soon too weak in number to man their weapon. Machinery roars like an angry beast as the smoking, crushed tank turns its' wounded turret toward the building and the German machine gunners pivot in the snow. There's a high pitched whine. Then a BOOM. The tank explodes. The Axis gunners try to retreat, but the bullets raining from the occupied building prove too much for them. They soon fall, shot in the back while trying to run. My mortar team emerges from the tree line and a group of engineers are not far behind, ready to build a fire for my dwindling army. That was only one tank down, and there were half a dozen more hiding somewhere in the cold Soviet night.

   Company of Heroes 2 works spectacularly on the micro level.  Maneuvering squads to ensure they have adequate cover and numbers to take on the enemy creates some truly impressive sights.  The more-zoomed-in-than-usual view makes for an experience not unlike watching a war movie being filmed from up high.  You're not just sending icons to meet enemy icons and hoping your rock beats their scissors or depending on a random roll of the dice to determine victory.  Moving each soldier into advantageous positions is nothing short of vital.  This is both a strength and weakness of the game.  If you don't babysit your crews expect them to make some dimwitted decisions.  They'll stand in the middle of the road as a tank rolls right up to them and cuts them to ribbons, or march right through an enemy stronghold without firing a shot.  The AI and pathfinding are questionable, so be prepared for a lot of clicking or a lot of dead soldiers.

   I'm not ashamed to admit I'm not well versed in real time strategy games, having only dabbled in a handful over the years. The aesthetic and setting of Company of Heroes definitely had me engaged and willing to learn more than most other genre offerings, but some legacy problems (for me, anyway...) kept me from a long term engagement.  The fourteen campaign missions are entirely staged affairs, and aside from a general overview of what you're meant to accomplish you're going in blind.  You could build up to the (small) population cap with mostly foot soldier fodder, running over enemy forces with impunity, only to run into a wall of tanks later that decimate them with a ticking timer or other encroaching objective looming that ensures you're fucked and need to reload a save or start the entire mission over again.  These are beginner's traps, and that's not good design.  You'll find ways to finish the battles eventually as you learn the requirements and the basics of the game, but that's not a good alternative to a sufficient tutorial and clear win conditions. A developer in a tutorial video encourages you to “watch YouTube videos” and “check with the community on forums” to learn the game, which “requires hundreds of hours to fully comprehend”... Maybe a bullet point for some, but personally I find it to be a little too much to ask.

  By the end of the campaign (on Easy) I was starting to get the basics down, but was running out of true single player content.  There are some skirmishes to check out and bot matches, but jumping into these scenarios with AI allies seemed a bit useless at that point: more learning of specific skill sets to an overall game I'm probably not going to get much deeper into.  There's multiplayer, of course, for those who are interested in that.. but I'm not ready to jump into the meat grinder against RTS animals who have been playing Company of Heroes 2 (and only Company of Heroes 2) non-stop since it released two years ago.  

  I don't know if I'll continue playing the game further or not, but I experienced Company of Heroes 2 as a solid 18 hour single player diversion.  It was fine for a casual RTS player like myself.  The WWII action is visceral and immediate, and moving platoons around the battlefield is satisfying if occasionally frustrating.  CoH2 doesn't seem to entirely escape from the genre trappings that I find rather off-putting, but taken as a chance to play weekend armchair general on the set of Saving Private Ryan it was enjoyable.