Company of Heroes 2: The Human Floodgates open!

I don't really feel all that bothered about spoiling the story for this review, since Animal Farm is pretty much required reading in English Secondary Schools; if you are *really* that bothered about it, the back button comes in useful today.

The Mighty Whitey SturmGeschütz, commanding it's very own native population

COH2 centres itself around Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's headfirst charge into wiping the Slavs off the face of the earth, and I'm not just lacking tact today.  The Campaign sees you through 14 missions chronicling the actions of some guy who leads some soldiers, then becomes a journo who inexplicably stumbles on some facts about the war that fail to uphold his communist sense of self, consequently his CO assigns him to a "СТРАФНИКИ" (Strafniki) Penal Batallion where he continues to uncover uncomfortable trinkets to the point where, his faith completely destroyed, he attempts to defect; attempt being the word used since he gets caught.  The delivery of this narrative doesn't do anything to break the mould, it's told a lot like a distinctly more popular title, Battlefield 3, through flashbacks and the fact that the character is under interrogation.

It doesn't help that the animation has a stiff, railroaded quality to it, indicating that it was done using the game engine; the campaign also suffers from what I like to call "Call of Pripyat cut the crap Disorder" - super brief cutscenes lasting a few seconds which add little to nothing to the exposition ("So, the underpass was filled with gas after it was sealed?").  This happens twice, once when you breach the fortress walls and see dead Soviet Prisoners that could already be seen during gameplay, and once more showing troops charging the Reichstag.  The only saving grace to this otherwise mediocre story is the ending, which I will leave up to you to uncover...  or just give youtube a bell, I did that for the story of Modern Warfare 3.

Well, it was either that or some powermongering git with a pistol...

While COH2 was never meant to set the world alight with it's dashing wordplay and eloquent social observation (here's to you, Dishonored!), it doesn't need to; not when the gameplay leaves the game comprehensively spoken for.  Company of Heroes completely turned my perceptions of RTS gaming on it's head, and up until that point I believed the ability to churn out tanks like queen bees on E was the height of tactical achievement.  With it's ability to give even single machine guns imperious weight and heavy tanks the weight of celestial bodies, suddenly you felt like a right gimp chimp when that Panther sped into the cottage out of control as though it were coming to breakfast.  This forces you contribute more to maneuver and demand less in slaughter.

This is especially so when even the environment seems to be after your dignity, frozen rivers can cave in under artillery or even the heavier tanks,  towing them under the ice to provide a new home for all kinds of weeds and fish for centuries to come; Infantry shouldn't feel too safe away from the rivers, blizzards occasionally ravage the battlefield regardless of what us mere monkeys are fighting over, and fire is often all that stands between them and hypothermal metabolic seizure.  This is somewhat pretentiously called "ColdTech", and a system which shows you precisely what your units are perceiving through the fog of war is called "TrueSight"; personally, I'm not so sure that features which cause people not to see what destroys the nearest building causing them to freeze to death warrant the status of separate coding packages.

Snow could be the death of your men out here

The two armies in the conflict are balanced spot on against one another, with the Red Army suiting human waves, bombastic artillery and other assorted zerg rushing; the conscripts are offered anytime for free pretty much throughout the campaign and they are often the first to snuff it in combat, so when you get the chance to let them fall in with better units, do it.  The Wehrmacht, having more class than this, is much better suited to considered tactical planning with more expensive but more powerful units and fewer soldiers to a squad.  I tend to do a lot better when playing the Wehrmacht, moral implications of Lebensraum aside.

Worthy of honourable mention is the Theatre of War DLC, offered to pre-purchasers (me) and available with a lot of skins and a few commanders for £30 on steam (or just buy the digital collectors edition for £70).  Fucking steep, but just about worth it when you consider that Relic stated they were going to add to it, and Relic is not a company to abandon a fanbase.  This is a series of missions, co-op and singleplayer, which place you into specific situations in the war that limit resources to the point where most modern commanders would give up; this is where the game genuinely beats out any other RTS you care to name, and shows that the scale of an RTS, while admirable in the major, can be just as stunning in the minor.  The example I would like to pick out is the mission where using just infantry, 2 starting Katyushas and abandoned Katyushas scattered across the map, you need to knock down all the German buildings in the region with civilian buildings netting an extra minute.  You have to count on footsoldiers to scout out these buildings, since the list includes ammo caches on capture points, MG bunkers and other trivial constructions; to make matters worse, panzer IVs stand in your way (thankfully they are the "stubby" variant).

Scorched Earth is visually arresting...

Sound design, something I feel is not often considered in game reviewing, even though it could be the difference between mowing the human lawn and avenging the villages wiped off the map in the name of meaningless racial purity - there's a reason why I still play Medal of Honor: Airborne from time to time in spite of it's right honourable brownness, and that is because the attention to it's soundscape is exquisite; that and the fact that I am terminally addicted to it's upgrade mechanic.  There is a clear, distinct hierarchy of weapons communicated by how heavy they sound, i.e: sniper rifles trump infantry rifles, the T-70's 45mm vs the Sdkfz 222's 20mm and ideally the Tiger vs many T-34s :) .  I have to say that the idle chatter in this game falls significantly flatter than that of COH, probably owing to the indoctrinated nature of the soldiers dampening their personality, so ultimately it does fit in and keep the immersion going.

So what does it come to?  Definitely not a 10/10 given how flat the story felt to me, but no lower than a 9/10, yep, let's go with that.  For an RTS trailblazer, it doesn't get much (or any) better than this; was it right that the game was put before the story?  Absolutely.