You want to play against actual people who can see your strategies and plan around them, forcing you to improvise. what you want is something more challenging. real-time strategy games aren't exactly popular for their single-player, since there's only so much enjoyment to be had from beating predictable AI. Again, co-op is the most entertaining way to play, but if you're into 1v1 battles, those are available too.īut, let's face it. Simply put, it pits you against the AI in multiplayer maps and lets you get some practice before you hit the Find Match button in multiplayer. Rounding up the list of single-player modes is the versus AI skirmish mode, which can also be played co-op. Single-player is fun, but co-op is definitely the best way to experience the Theatre. They essentially put you in situations based on real-life events during World War 2. There are separate scenarios for single-player and co-op, and each are challenging in their own way. The campaign eventually opens up to allow more creativity and tacticsįor the history buffs, there's the Theatre of War, which has a bunch of scenarios from 1941 for both German and Russian armies. There is even a bit of room for creativity when taking on certain objectives, letting you flex your inner Armchair General. However, once you get deeper into the campaign, things do start opening up maps become more expansive and missions get challenging. The first few missions are quite simple and linear as a result of this.
Often, it is left to the players themselves to figure things out.
New gameplay mechanics are constantly added into missions and you are forced to use them, but most of the information is lost in the chaos that generally takes place in and around a battlefield. The campaign attempts to ease players into Company of Heroes 2 mechanics, but doesn't manage to be graceful or elegant about it. Despite it being the same old World War 2 story that we've heard countless times, it feels fresh because of the framing device.
Each mission is Lev explaining his side of the things in events that take place during the war. Lev is languishing in a Siberian labour camp because of the contents of his journals, which have deemed to be worthy of treason charges because of his negative protrayal and questioning of the Soviet Union during World War 2. The campaign focuses on the story of a single soldier of the Red Army-Lev Abramovich Isakovich (we'll call him Lev for purposes of brevity)-with the rather interesting "interrogation" framing device that we've seen in other war games such as Battlefield 3. The single player of the game is divided in three parts-the campaign mode, versus AI skirmishes and the single player missions in Theatre of War. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's move on to the actual review. When the first game was launched, it made a giant wave in the strategy genre because of how much it truly refined the systems that Relic had set in place with Dawn of War. First, however, a quick primer: Company of Heroes 2 is a real-time strategy game set during World War 2, much like the first CoH. The RTS veteran continues this tradition with its latest outing-Company of Heroes 2. On the other hand, Relic's strategy games, ever since the first Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, have always had the same distinct style to them: less resource management and more focus on the combat.