

More importantly, the single-player campaign is just the opening course. When it all goes right, you’re a military mastermind.Ĭompany of Heroes 2: Additional Game Modes When it all goes wrong, you try to learn from your mistakes and start again. As you flick from unit to unit, rushing out orders for your engineers to mine here, your conscripts to set up a heavy machine gun here and massing shock troops for a counter-attack, you really feel like an armchair general. Yet the spaces between the dots are larger, and there’s more scope to try a range of different strategies. To an extent, Company of Heroes 2 does the same thing.

So many recent strategy games, including StarCraft 2 and its Heart of the Swarm expansion, can leave you feeling like you’re just joining up the dots between the big narrative set-pieces that the game was designed around. Get over this initial hump, however, and it’s a fantastically rewarding strategy game. They rarely change their facing unless prompted, and have a nasty habit of navigating from one point to the next in a way that takes them straight into enemy fire.

To make things worse, your units need a little micro-management. If you don’t know how to group units and use hotkeys to switch between them, Company of Heroes 2 isn’t really going to tell you, and both skills are essential, particularly in the large defensive battles where you might be fighting at three or four points on the map at once. Sequel pretty much throws you in at the deep end. Where the first game spent the first few hours easing you in, the It’s a sophisticated game, the UI isn’t always crystal-clear, and Troops to micro-manage, and doesn’t do a great job of explaining how toĭo it. Company of Heroes 2: Verdict ReviewĬhallenges with Company of Heroes 2 is that it throws you a lot of.
