➤ Cold Russia 🎮

In 2006, the real-time strategy was largely anchored to styles imposed years earlier and successfully iterated through sequels and mountains of non-original products. Just in 2005 the shelves of the shops had been invaded by Age of Empires III, certainly not a revolution, and in England Creative Assembly had for some time invented a completely new formula to say one's own in the complex genre between real time and shifts. Relic Entertainment, which in just a few years gained throngs of adoring fans above all thanks to the sensational space epic of Homeworld, was however almost ready to emerge from the icy snows of Vancouver to say something new. The Canadian team intended to stage the battles of '39 -'45 on the screens, a scenario where there were no workers or drones intent on gathering resources, only brutal clashes with hundreds of lives left on the ground, armored vehicles and a battlefield to be mastered with cunning. Action and fine micro-management of troops in highly interactive environments: is it possible to make such a leap towards an unexpected modernity in one fell swoop? Possible yes, to the point that Company of Heroes immediately becomes one of the best gaming products of that season, a success that earns two official expansions and the immediate countdown of the fans, who will have to wait until the summer of seven years later. to get hold of an official following. A second chapter that does not try to take a new photograph of the genre, rather prefers to recover the negative of the time and return to the dark room to develop it in the light of progress and ideas that have emerged in the past. The result was successful, to play and fun even if not perfect.

Mother Russia

By completing a partial version of the Company of Heroes 2 campaign, a beta with a handful of missions, a couple of months ago we came to the conclusion that this time not only would the title be equipped with rewarding gameplay and an important technical component, but also of a narrative structure and a playful coherence between the missions that really gave the impression of playing an epic adventure set during the Second World War.

After retracing the stories of Lev Abramovich Isakovich, the protagonist imprisoned in Siberia and the leitmotif of a campaign that takes place on the Russian front, the Soviet side, we must admit that the expectation was met only at times. The fourteen missions that make up the backbone of the single-player experience are interspersed with non-thrilling quality footage, but that's only a small part of our partial disappointment. The game fails to introduce certain mechanics in a satisfactory way and the quality of the missions alternates exciting moments, such as the night chase of a German Tiger tank or a brutal assault on the gates of Poznan, with others designed in a lazy way, as if they had been worked for. make firewood and reach fifteen hours of duration. However, it is important to note that this qualitative swing is about the variety of objectives and the diversity of situations, not the strategic gameplay itself. From that point of view Company of Heroes 2 is solid and firmly anchored to the philosophy that inspired the original. The resources available must be used to create the mix of simple, specialized soldiers and the means necessary to control the maps, not to assemble huge armies to be launched without care at the opponent. Each cover is decisive and the relatively calm pace suggests that you choose carefully where to place each fixed location or behind which wall to shelter your mortars. Being able to take a column of enemy tanks by surprise, perhaps by blowing the thin ice under their tracks, means calling into question the inertia of an already lost game and thus being able to return to gain the meters and control points necessary to have the best.

Certain innovations, such as the so-called Cold Tech and the presence during some missions of extreme climatic conditions from which to protect oneself, are less incisive than expected. But others, especially the ability to climb over covers and a better simulation of the visual field, do their part to make the fight plausible. Unrealistic, as the series has never made any simulation claims. The title, like its predecessor, rather manages to transform suggestions typical of the time and of the conflict into strategic options. Having plenty of means at your disposal requires you to take around engineers, necessary to repair the very expensive war machines, while lethal solutions such as gunners and snipers require time and space to be placed by the textbook, suggesting to blindly send young recruits ready to die.

One of the pillars of the Russian army that left nearly nine million lives on the battlefield. All this moving control groups, recruiting units and keeping different fronts at bay is done - even practically through the interface and commands - by systems that are largely carbon copies of those of the original, of which Company of Heroes 2 is reveals a loyal following. Giving your voice to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of fans has meant creating an experience for the single player that at first will not make it easy for newbies to get close to the title, but the effort will soon pay off. The three difficulty levels give a very good margin of customization, making commitment, gratification and even a pinch of frustration go hand in hand.

The explosion

Along with many of the typical features of the series and the genre, such as building creations and developing upgrades or the need to impose your own dominance on the control points scattered around the map, Company of Heroes 2 returns to the ambitious use of an advanced technical component, exploited to say something significant also in playful terms. Depending on the composition of your army, here more numerous than in the past, the clashes between the streets of a battered Stalingrad may suggest taking advantage of the buildings to hide or demolish them, minimizing the risks of ambushes and cul-de-sacs, lethal for the clumsy and heavy forces on wheels and tracks. Explosions and blows then shape the pitch, blow up covers and burn or knock down houses, walls and buildings. There is no other strategic with the same feedback and there are moments that amaze at how well the dramatic implications of the conflict on the lives of soldiers are represented. The impact of weather conditions on the gameplay, as we said in the previous paragraph, was not overturning but mixes with other interactive elements of the scenario, such as the different properties of the trampled surfaces, to reinforce a quality that very few real-time strategies can claim to have. , that is to make certain mechanics disappear from under the eyes, usually cold and calculated, and integrate them to the game context and to the characters, therefore to the story told by each battle.

Unfortunately, these undeniable qualities, which raise the drama of each game, are compounded by problems, for example, linked to the path finding that is not always perfect, which in particular during single player missions, often set in denser maps than multiplayer ones, creates situations that are not always perfect. pleasant. Even the menus and the interface, although reworked over the months, are still a bit too confusing and not very elegant. On the purely visual side, the Essence Engine 3.0 derives directly from the previous versions. In fact, Company of Heroes 2 does not depart from the past chapters for technical performance, limiting itself to improving the variety of environments and units. Here we pass from luxuriant woods to snow-covered expanses, cities razed to the ground and others that are just waiting for our passage to be put to the test, in a constant change of setting that always offers something new to discover. Unfortunately, if in 2006 Company of Heroes brought several systems to their knees thanks to its advanced cosmetics, today its successor marks a much less marked detachment, with evident qualitative drops that involve certain surfaces and occasionally the animations.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

The editorial team uses the ASUS CG8250 Personal Computer
Processor: Intel Core i7 860 at 2.8 GHz
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
Operating system: Windows 7 64-bit

Minimum requirements

2Ghz Intel Core2 Duo processor
RAM 2GB
Scheda video 512MB Direct3D 10
30GB of disk space

Endless war

Although it partly betrays the promises of a more orchestrated progression and fails to mark a marked technical step forward, we liked the Company of Heroes 2 single player campaign and it represents a valid starting point. We are not experts on the eastern front, but the scenarios, from Operation Barbarossa to the battle for Berlin, are credible and succeed in evoking the peculiarities of that bloody conflict, often fought below the freezing threshold. The long-term appeal is instead entrusted to two distinct modalities. On the one hand there is Theater of War, a package that combines single player and cooperative maps adding a considerable amount of useful hours especially for those who, having little experience with the genre or the series, want other challenges before jumping into the multiplayer arena. The maps designed for Theater of War, which involves both the Russians as protagonists of the campaign and the Germans, are about ten on each side and there is plenty to have fun for a while. The competitive component is the definitive landing place for those who feel ready to spend the months to come on Company of Heroes 2 and, as for the rest of the title, there is a strong feeling of being in the presence of an updated version of the multiplayer of the original. . Certainly not a negative aspect, given the quality of the same. In reality there are some new features, for example the possibility of "specializing" the control points by having resource accumulation nodes built on them, but the skeleton has remained unchanged. We challenge ourselves to the last point or to the last soldier left standing, depending on the options, in battles of considerable dynamism and strategic breadth.

To keep up with the times - and partly also to keep a door open for DLCs - Relic has developed a meta progression that accompanies each mode and through the accumulation of points it unlocks aesthetic customizations, passive perks called Bullettin but above all new Commanders . Before each challenge you can select a maximum of three Commanders - out of five available, at launch, two of which to be unlocked - and accumulate enough Battle Points if you choose one, which provides five active and passive skills. Depending on how you play the game and what tactics you adopt, one choice will be better than the other. The impact of the Commanders, which replace the concept of Doctrines, at first may seem marginal but the more you play the more it becomes evident how much a careful choice can be worth the victory of the match. During the beta and the different phases that characterized the year there were balancing and matchmaking problems, which in part still remain, but as always in this kind of products, you need to be patient a little and wait for the inevitable post-launch adjustments to be made. implemented. In short, a product in progress as it should be.

Comment

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8.8

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8.3

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Company of Heroes 2 is a loyal sequel, firmly tied to the original in both technical and playful terms. The campaign fails to make a decisive leap forward towards greater immersion and the missions are not uniform in quality, but Relic's clockwork gameplay easily holds the weight of the years, mixing refined strategic options and an interaction with the game environment that very few other titles can rely on. The result is to be played, also because between main and side modes and a deep multiplayer component there is fun for a long time. After so many years of waiting, perhaps it was legitimate to expect something more, especially in terms of finishing and visual evolution, but the new life of the Canadian developer, now under the control of SEGA, bodes well for a full-bodied and lasting post-launch support. A title to have, probably one of the best PC exclusives of the year in the enclosure of the so-called "triple A" titles.