Company of Heroes 2......
Like any brave Russian soldier, Rich McCormick steps forth with a rifle but no bullets and tries to survive the Eastern Front in this real-time strategy game.
Send wave after wave of fearless Russian fighters to the Eastern front and pray that the Wehrmacht’s guns jam, or they give up, or something.
The game’s called Companyof
Heroes2 ( CoH2), but you’re a long way into the 15-hour campaign before Relic’s real-time strategy game finds any heroism. It’s set on World War II’s frigid Eastern Front and is more concerned with rifle-butting home the horror of that bloodiest sector of the conflict. The Eastern Front saw the brunt of the war: Germany lost 80 per cent of its Wehrmacht casualties east of Berlin; the Soviets themselves lost some 26 million souls, 8.6 million of whom were in the military.
Learning about this is harrowing; playing it is too. The Soviet war effort hinged on the country’s ability to spit out prodigious amounts of young men and women to fight and die for their motherland. That translates to game mechanics: as Soviet general-in-thesky, you have a near-endless stream of people you can send to their doom.
Squads are better trained, tougher and more specialist, encompassing groups as varied as mortar crews, snipers and shock troops armed with smoke and frag grenades. Conscripts can be brought in from the edges of the map every 30 seconds. At their lowest rank they’re weak against almost everything, but they’re quick to produce and essentially free, limited by just two of CoH2’s four resources: manpower – which is almost comically quick to regenerate on medium difficulty – and the population cap.
That population cap has increased since the first CompanyofHeroes, and many missions allow you 135 tiny pawns to use. It feels like a lot: keeping track of an entire army is stressful, especially when many of the missions demand you fight on two fronts on top of defending your base from roving groups of grenadiers. Having conscripts on tap means these defences don’t need to be particularly well thought out.
CoH2’s worst missions feel as if they’re backwards: instead of playing the plucky, clever underdogs, you’re upgraded to the role of military colossus; hurling infinite resources at the brick wall until sheer erosion cracks a hole, and it suffers most as a game when it’s trying to tell its weighty story. The burden of history weighs particularly heavily on the early quarter of the campaign. With the Germans pushing into Russia, the Soviet forces are in full retreat, meaning many missions aren’t won so much as vacated.
But there is glory here, and there are heroes. CompanyofHeroes2’s quieter missions are its most memorable. One level in Polish territory gives you control of a super-sniper and a few squads of her resistance chums. Unlike most squads, the snipers will hold fire until directly ordered to shoot, making traversing the Polish forests a pleasingly efficient military exercise: move one set of snipers to the treeline to provide cover for another leapfrogging duo, before destroying an enemy squad with six carefully aimed bullets fired in a single devastating salvo.
Failure of intelligence
CompanyofHeroes2’s AI is a bit suspect, leading to some confusing scenarios. We’re not experts in mechanised warfare, but we don’t think the Wehrmacht’s primary tank tactic on spotting enemy vehicles was to jam their steel charges into high gear and trundle towards the foe like affectionate puppies. Pathfinding was also a problem for some of our troops.
Even that weak enemy AI, however, is less of a problem than you’d expect. After the retreats of the campaign’s first third, the Red Army has time to coalesce and push back. For much of the rest of the story we were driving the steamroller inexorably closer to Berlin.
Even better are CoH2’s Theatre of War missions. These are focused fights split into three categories: solo challenges, co-op scenarios and AI battles. Where the main campaign can be bloated, these missions are exhilarating in their singular focus and multiple options. Co-op missions are similarly freeform. Both generals can choose to mix and match similar forces and push together on their objectives, or to coordinate and specialise.
It’s sometimes clumsy, a game that can’t maintain all its systems, with too many disparate moving parts to feel consistently coherent. But the final result, despite the small losses along the way, is a winner.