Isakovich watches in Stalingrad as a commissar gives a machine gunner the order to shoot retreating troops.
They're not rendered in the game's engine and they're not fancy CG, looking more like some terrible Xbox shooter, animated as if their actors were having their emotions signed to them off-stage a minute too late. It's a worthy and true tale – one of traitors and egotists killing their own people – but it's almost entirely undone by cutscenes that look like they were made in 1945. Cutscenes tell the tale of Isakovich, a soldier turned journalist who documents the heroism of average men and women sent to their deaths.
It suffers most as a game when it's trying to tell its weighty story.
"Company of Heroes 2's worst missions feel like they're backwards."Ĭompany of Heroes 2's worst missions feel like they're backwards: instead of playing the plucky, clever underdogs, you're upgraded to the role of military colossus, infinite resources hurled at the brick wall until sheer erosion cracks a hole. My tactic may have been historically accurate, but trying to drown your opponent in your own soldiers' blood isn't a particularly satisfying strategy to play out in a real-time strategy game. Any lost conscripts could be replaced in seconds, and any lost soldiers could be too: conscripts have the ability to join up with a depleted squad to take them back up to their maximum complement. To avoid coming out of the campaign with actual PTSD, I found it easier to simply roll my forces into a ball – toughest units clustered at the middle, fleshy conscripts on the outside – and smash through enemy positions. This second type of soldier gives Company of Heroes its Soviet tinge, and can sometimes make it unsatisfying to play. In most missions, squads can be trained at your home base or brought into battle as conscripts. That quirk of population translates to game mechanics: as Soviet general-in-the-sky, I had a near-endless stream of people I could click on to send to their doom. The Soviet war effort hinged on the country's ability to spit out prodigious amounts of young men and women to fight and die for their motherland. Learning about this is harrowing playing it is too. "It's a long way into the 15-hour campaign before Relic's real-time strategy game finds any heroism." The Eastern Front saw the brunt of the war: Germany lost 80% of its Wehrmacht casualties east of Berlin the Soviets themselves lost some 26 million souls overall, 8.6 million of whom were in the military. It's set on World War II's frigid Eastern Front, and is more concerned with rifle-butting home the horror of that bloodiest sector of the conflict. It's called Company of Heroes 2, but it's a long way into the 15-hour campaign before Relic's real-time strategy game finds any heroism.
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