When the Heroes joined the Company

Let me tell you how I first came into contact with Company of Heroes; upon seeing adverts in Custom PC, I thought that the 3 soft-pencilled men standing in formation was to be another WW2 shooter, something I had already played enough of given MOHAA and Bf1942 ate so much of time that could have been spent buying clothing that's marked up like it's 1943 and the "correct" brand is selling sky-high priced food into my local ghetto...  blimey, that's dark...

Anyway, that was until my brother obtained a new graphics card which contained a copy of COH, he wanted nothing with it for one reason or another and I fired up what I expected to be an FPS - I am way past Chamberlain for how wrong I was.  As I said before, this was a total game-changer; I stopped thinking like an ant colony when playing RTS... et cetera.  Point is, I've just played through the campaign again, and now I can properly compare COH to COH2.

I won this one with many snipers and Arty...  there were some tanks and rangers in the picture somewhere, too...

I'm too tired for paragraphs, have some bullet points:

Goodness

• Gameplay is stellar, as it should be if it were to deserve a sequel
• Story doesn't try to be anything more than a Company going through the war - if you are going to make a game story, either make a Novel or keep it simple
• More tigers

Gimpiness

• Gigantic Difficulty Spike on Mortain Counterattack level, similar to COH2's Partisan level; best to use Airborne Company and paradrop AT guns and troops and just let those buggers wreck your base!
• Graphics are noticeably lower quality (why am I even mentioning this?  Graphics never go DOWN in a sequel)
• More tigers

Overall, how should I expect the previous installment to be better; let alone the first campaign in such installment?  I shouldn't, otherwise why bother, right?  Anyway, have some death:

Ever gotten so immersed in a game you forgot to take screenshots?