Stumbling through the snow of the Russian Winter, Company of Heroes disappoints, writes Phill Cameron
But that’s where courage and finesse could have helped. Courage to tackle the context with the respect and delicacy that it requires, and finesse to make sure they don’t fall into the trap of trivialising immense human suffering with abstract game systems, or a derivative narrative that somehow frames you as the only good guy in Stalingrad, railing against the unforgivable waste of human life that characterised the Red Army.
And it’s here that Company of Heroes manages to fail on both counts, and it’s the hardest issue to overcome as a player. First the all but legendary Russian winter is turned into a series of checkpoints as you ferry men between fires so they don’t freeze to death, and then the reprehensible tactic of shooting retreating soldiers is turned into a single unit that stands in your base executing men as they fall back to regroup. Regardless of the confused attempts to frame this all as some personal story of a particular lieutenant, the abstraction of these defining moments into base game systems seems crass at best.
The shift in location from one side of the war to the other is understandable, at least. Company of Heroes did a fantastic job of treading the line between the characteristic abstraction of your average strategy game and the respectful attention to simulation that a game set during World War 2 all but necessitates, and retreading the same ground would have only highlighted the relatively few evolutions that Company of Heroes 2 brings to the table. So the moving a few hundred miles East allows it to breathe, pulling experiences out of the environment that characterised the bitter conflict between Germany and Russia.
And, at its best, Company of Heroes 2 still does capture that brilliant balance that its predecessor struck so well. The missions that keep the objectives simple; cover a retreat, or push into occupied territory, allow the systems to shine, with units grabbing discarded machine guns and flame throwers, or manning abandoned anti-tank guns and turning them on their previous owners. But it seems like there’s almost a crisis of faith on the part of Relic, the developer, as the missions quickly descend into falsely scripted affairs, predicated on you understanding cryptic objectives so you don’t end up in a situation that works against the way they’ve skewed the game into presenting.
One particular mission, set in the dead of Russian winter, ended in a farce as I attempted to assault an emplacement that Company of Heroes 2 wasn’t ready for me to assault, and all but one of my men were slaughtered. However, for some reason the game couldn’t allow me to fail, and this solo soldier was rendered immortal, achieving victory through dull attrition, rather than any strategically brilliance on my part. The whole campaign creaks.
As with the first game, it’s in the multiplayer that Company of Heroes 2 manages to come into its own. It’s here that the abstract systems that take inspiration from World War 2 are allowed to be abstract, and don’t feel entirely out of place or irreverent. Instead the new adherence to weather and a more detailed attention to the smaller scale add another layer of depth to the proceedings, giving you more to consider as you manoeuvre your men through the field.
Despite all this, it’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that Company of Heroes 2 doesn’t really deserve its numerical. It certainly has the visual improvements of a sequel, and Relic have the heritage out of the Dawn of War games to demonstrate some properly new developments in the strategy genre with something as big as Company of Heroes 2. But instead it just feels like a slight iteration on an already proven formula, perhaps understandable if it hadn’t been seven years since the previous game.
Instead we’re left with what feels like a bloated expansion, providing the right amount of content for a sequel but not nearly enough in the way of new ideas. That there are problems /on top/ of that, both in tone and execution, make it difficult to recommend to any but the most ardent fans of the original. The most damning way to frame Company of Heroes 2 is to look at the Men of War series, and how, despite its wildly erratic difficulty, it manages to realise World War 2 to a higher level of fidelity and strategy without ever feeling reductive or irreverent. Stories positively gush out of that game as you play it, each one the result of one perfectly realised system clashing with another, while in Company of Heroes 2 everything feels a little too canned, and far too planned.
It’s undoubtedly competent, but a development studio with the heritage of Relic, through the sublime Homeworld games, the original Company of Heroes, and their many iterations of the excellent Dawn of War games, competence isn’t enough. Company of Heroes 2 cruises when it should be sprinting, and when you couple that with the fumbling of the tone and setting it becomes a very difficult game to recommend.
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