You’ll max out your stick pretty quickly. Once you’ve chosen which of the three commander sticks you’re going to use in a match, you don’t make any further choices. One commander doesn’t feel that different from any other commanders, particularly since there’s so little information available to evaluate the units. It doesn’t allow for much of a sense of personality. Maybe a single new unit, a couple of special attacks, and a passive bonus. During a drawn out game, you might work you way up both paths.īut instead of a commander skill tree, Company of Heroes 2 only gives you a set of whittled down commander sticks. Each tree altered significantly how your faction played, and furthermore each tree had two paths. In the original game, you would pick one of three commander skill trees as soon as you earned your first commander point. Relic’s take on the Eastern Front really falls on its face with the pared down commanders. Once you can tell a MG42 from a Maxim, Company of Heroes 2 has no meaningful information about what sets them apart. You just get a weapon silhouette without so much as a tooltip. The interface doesn’t even tell you what kinds of weapons your units are carrying. One tank might as well be like any other tank except for the general text in the panel where information normally goes. The previous game had numbers to represent how effective units were, and to help you compare them to each other. For instance, one new feature is a bewildering lack of information.
It’s the same reason Command & Conquer stopped having random lightning strikes destroying your units.Īctually, although I said this is Company of Heroes 1 all over again, that’s not quite true. There’s a reason most micromanagement intensive RTSs like Company of Heroes don’t bother with variable weather. Sometimes a tank falls through the ice on a frozen river. Sometimes there’s a blizzard and you can’t see very far. Sometimes the snow slows down your dudes unless you manually path them along a road. You know the micromanagement you save by not having to actively capture flags? So much for that. On those maps, your guys will take damage if you don’t put them in houses or near fires. Snow is apparently the fundamental gameplay fact of the Eastern Front. But in terms of new gameplay, Company of Heroes 2 doesn’t have much to say beyond, “Look, snow!” You can capture vehicles in addition to guns.
They just stand in a radius around the flag and the associated resource converts. To capture a point, your soldiers don’t have to actively “capture” the flag. The maps aren’t divided so obviously into discrete territories.
It’s not entirely identical, of course, since this is a sequel set on the Eastern Front.
CAN I RUN COMPANY OF HEROES 2 WINDOWS
The same resource model, the same victory condition, the same faction concepts (Germany is still Germany, of course, but Russia is basically the US), the same types of maps, the same unit dynamics, and even the same graphics, but with inexplicably stratospheric system requirements (why does this need Windows 7?). In terms of the gameplay, this is Company of Heroes 1 all over again. For starters, there’s basically nothing new here. You loved Company of Heroes no matter how badly you were burned out on World War II! It did so many things right: the interplay of infantry and armor, the destructible terrain, the commander abilities, the four factions, the victory conditions, the various game modes, the voice acting, the interface, the fancy graphics, the gratifyingly tactical fiddliness.Īfter the jump, what would possibly go wrong with the sequel?Ĭompany of Heroes 2 might be the steepest tumble from game design genius to crassly missing the point that I’ve ever seen.
It brought design innovation and Hollywood kick to the genre, and it did it with a stultifyingly familiar setting. Company of Heroes is a classic real time strategy game for a reason.
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