izigame.me

COH2 is leagues above its previous title in many ways (and not so in others) and also managed to blow the new-ish COH3 out of the water (somehow??). This game can be split mainly into two categories, campaign and skirmish, and one of them is really good (skirmish) while the other is mediocre at best (campaign).

Skirmish
This is where the game truly does shine. It has 5 different armies for you to chose from (Soviets, United States Armed Forces, British, Wehrmacht Ostheer, and Oberkommando West) that all play drastically different from one another and have their own strengths and weaknesses. All of these factions are good in their own right, but they force the player to use an entirely different play-style or strategy. The game is currently in its best balanced state when all units are properly balanced with one another and the historical usefulness of these units seems to scale with their performance in game. Every unit is valuable in one way or another, you just need to learn it. The tank engagements don't play out how their real life iterations happened, but if that were the case as soon as the axis fielded a King Tiger (or even a Jagdtiger), it would take the entire allied effort to stop it.

The Campaign and T.O.W.
This is where the game drops off in terms of quality unfortunately. The first Company of Heroes had an amazing campaign with expansions that added entirely new stories (and armies) that were based on historical events. COH2 on the other hand has two main campaigns; the Soviets and the Battle of the Bulge. The Battle of the Bulge is easily the best out of the two of them, allowing you to level different platoons, plant strategic attacks, and actually manage resources more efficiently. I highly recommend the Battle of the Bulge campaign, one of the only shining lights from it. Everything else relating to the soviets is underwhelming at best. The story they tried to tell during the Soviet campaign is an awesome idea, but unless you have a previous knowledge of Soviet history, it kinda leaves you confused on why they jump around to many different locations all the time. As it stands the soviet campaign tries to cram 4 years worth of combat into just 14 missions and in doing so they leave out some of the most important/historic moments from the Eastern Front. (The entire Summer of 1943 is gone; the turning point in the war) In order to remedy this mistake they've made 4 different T.O.W. mission packs, but they're very short, have no cutscenes, and often don't really tell much. Operation Barbarossa is easily the most fun of them, but even if you play extremely well, the Soviet AI will usually overpower you with their superior T34s and KV1s. There are definitely missions that were made with a specific goal in mind (The Brody Tank War), but other missions are just a skirmish against the AI. It's very lazy and overall just leaves the Soviets with a couple of good missions that you have to cherry pick from all of the campaign and T.O.W. Even though I do think that the campaign missions are worth playing; the main praises about this game come from the skirmishes and just how many ways to play there are.

The Microtransactions
SEGA drug the COH series into the hell that is microtransactions and this is the first game that fell victim to it. The steam store page in itself is disgusting to look at since every unlockable skin, commander, and expansion mission in the game has its own store page. Not to mention the fact that only 2/5 armies are available to play with the base game. The USF and OKW can be bought together in a bundle, but the British are an entirely different paid army. Everything else can be purchased thru the in-game currency system, which is nice, but some commanders in the game are clearly pay to win. Certain commanders combine different abilities and units in ways that make a very hard composition to crack. Naturally it comes down to how they use these units in the field, but while the base commanders have access to a couple good abilities, none are considered to be among the best.

All in all, I think the game is extremely fun to play, either solo or with friends. It truly has its own unique charm to add to the WW2 genre, while also providing a lot of historical units and the history that came along with them. The game has its moments, but seeing a M26 Pershing spearheading an assault alongside a KV2, or seeing a Sturmtiger deafen the front lines while a King Tiger pushes in behind it cannot be beaten.

9/10, if not microtransactions would be a 10/10