Patton himself and a lukewarm cup of tap water. Playing on “Captain” difficulty (the game’s equivalent to Normal) I alternatively felt like I was squaring off against General George S. The AI difficulty is also frustratingly inconsistent.

Maybe that’s meta-commentary on Soviet High Command during World War II, but I doubt it.Ĭombat in Company of Heroes 2 oscillates between wonderfully challenging and disconcertingly easy. It’s just another timer to pay attention to, one more example that the horrific images conveyed in the game’s scripted sequences rarely affect how you actually play-they’re just set dressing. Given how linear most of the campaign missions are, Company of Heroes 2 ends up playing out like a weird Call of Duty or Medal of Honor strategy game where you aimlessly follow the game’s directions with no real sense of why. It’s a neat idea, but in practice it rarely has any negative consequences in my time with the game I never saw anyone executed because of 227. One of the Russian front-liners gets shot, and you see the man behind him scrounge the weapon from the corpse and continue charging. In one of the game’s first cutscenes you see a line of Soviet grunts, many unarmed, charging a Nazi position.

Who cares if the Germans have a tank? You have a hundred men, and a hundred more after that, and a hundred more after that-this is a war of attrition in its rawest form. Unfortunately, the emphasis on this “throw-more-men-at-the-problem” tactic removes any sense of real desperation from the campaign. These conscripts make poor soldiers, but there are certainly a lot of them to go around-a seemingly infinite number, in fact.

Your main special ability involves calling up conscripts-fodder troops forcefully drafted into the Soviet army that you can merge into other units to replenish their numbers or treat as disposable forces. The Russian Army relies on conscripts backed up by heavy-duty firepower. Squaring off against the Nazis, you definitely come to understand this war involved a smaller, more powerful German force on one side and a meat grinder on the other No matter what obstacle you’re facing, the primary solution is to throw more men at the front lines. Relic definitely tries to capture what made the Eastern Front so horrific.

Company of heros 2 gameplay