The other additions to the Essence Engine 3.0 are welcome, but they quickly fall to the back of the mind during play despite the catchy feature names. I wish it was used more throughout the game. Unfortunately, the weather is only plays a factor during a few of the campaign missions, and a handful of multiplayer maps. Woe to the player who loses a tank this way.
You sometimes have to traverse frozen rivers and lakes, and a grenade in the right place can crack the ice to kill whatever unit is above. Bold generals might want to take advantage of the storms to assault unsuspecting troops, a strategy I used more than once while playing COH2. Periodic blizzards will descend on some maps, increasing the harsh conditions, so it usually makes sense to wait them out. Your troops will freeze to death unless they are inside a building or near a campfire. As Hitler and Napoleon discovered before you, the Russian countryside is very cold in the winter. It’s not often you say this in a game review, but you have to pay attention to the weather effects in COH2. It’s not easy, but when you successfully hold off a tank attack with some well-placed grenades and immediately counter-attack with the armor you just built to turn the tide – well, these are the best moments of COH2. Resources are earned by holding points on the map, and this design forces the player to orchestrate a delicate balance between aggressive tactical maneuvers to take and hold territory and waiting for more powerful vehicles.
You can only get tanks, half-tracks and other vehicles once you build the requisite structures, but these cost a lot of fuel, munitions and manpower – the three resources in COH2. In both the 14-mission single-player campaign and in multiplayer skirmishes, you need to build up your base to get the best units.
If you don’t like dark war stories, you may miss the more heroically portrayed Western Front of COH. It’s cool to see history come to life in game mechanics with the harsh winters killing Germans and Russians alike, and Order 227 taking out your units if they pull back to the base when a party officer is looking. One thing’s for sure, the Russian front was an incredibly bleak place in 1941, and the narrative of COH2 underlines it with Russian soldiers shot for retreating or disobeying orders. In between the missions, there’s some cutscenes with decent acting, and I enjoyed that most of them were extremely short, teasing you with a brief introduction before getting you back into the action of commanding troops. The campaign is framed around a Russian lieutenant reliving the war through an interview with his former commanding officer. The fun of COH2 comes from using position and cover to your advantage, and in this way it felt true to how I imagine small arms combat was during the period. Specialized units like engineers – able to plant mines, explosives or construct buildings – and shock troops – grenadiers, essentially – are valuable, and the micromanagement of merging untrained conscripts into these units once casualties are suffered will occupy most of your time. Cover is essential, and you’ll find yourself moving troops between sandbag walls and into buildings just to survive. All the combat happens automatically, with shots being fired almost continuously. You move groups of troops around the battlefields which vary from fields and farmhouses to bombed-out urban ruins. Set on the Eastern front of World War II, you’ll play as either the Russians or the Germans. In contrast, the long-awaited sequel doesn’t alter much from its predecessor’s formula, and that’s why COH2 delivers an amazingly fun experience. You don’t have to put resource-collecting units on the map? That’s crazy talk! Of course, COH was incredibly successful precisely because it broke the norm.
When the original Company of Heroes came out in 2006, it changed a lot of gamer’s perceptions of what “real-time strategy” meant.