I’ve sent thousands of American, German and British soldiers to die in battle. I’ve sent men into situations where I knew they would die in order to win the larger fight, seen tanks go from powerful symbols of freedom into burning husks within seconds and put so many craters into quaint villages that they look like the surface of the moon. All of this and more I’ve done in the real time strategy franchise Company of Heroes.
Company of Heroes, more than any other game in any genre, has let me experience the horrors of war. Granted, it’s a representation wrapped up in the conventions of a video game, but it still portrays combat in a realistic enough way that it sometimes makes me reflect on how awful these men had it. Despite two expansions, the original Company of Heroes never took us to the Eastern Front, where more than 20 million people lost their lives. That changes in 2013 with the release of Company of Heroes 2, when everyone will finally get direct control over Soviet forces, taking them into battles fought and won as much by desperation as by sound tactics. Having recently tried it myself, I’ve briefly experienced battles in the most brutal front in history.
Despite having played hours of Company of Heroes, the sequel still threw me for a bit of a loop. The basic gameplay principles from the first game are carried over to the second (you still capture points to collect resources, cover is crucial, vehicle positioning matters, etc.), but many subtle changes have been implemented. Some of them, like the new True Sight mechanic, make the game feel more realistic, and make fighting in tight spaces much more claustrophobic. Since your units no longer have a 360 degree view (but instead have their vision broken up by terrain like they would in real life) you realize how much more frightening it is for a soldier to move into an area with lots of obstructions. Enemies could come from anywhere; intersections, which previously made me think of all the directions I could move, now make me fear what the hell will be around the corner. Scouting has become far more important than it was in the original Company of Heroes.
Likewise, resources play totally differently. In earlier Company of Heroes titles, you captured points with specific resources attached to them; an ammo point gave ammo, a fuel point fuel, etc. This made points with high resources an integral part of the level design, and in multiplayer this often resulted in furious battles to control a specific point that could make the difference between victory and defeat. While the details are still being ironed out, developer Relic is giving you the option to choose what resource you need in Company of Heroes 2. In an effort to encourage players to battle over more areas of the map, Relic leaves it to players to determine which resources are important. This comes alongside a smaller number of capturable points to hopefully make the maps easier to create and for you to tell when you have resources connected. In practice it’s still hard to know how it will shake out. The single match I played against the AI wasn’t enough to learn the maps or the Russian forces intimately enough to know if I should lean my resources toward ammo or fuel. Still, it’s a potentially exciting change because it makes it harder to predict what your foe is up to. Previously, if you knew they were capturing a lot of fuel you could predict what they might be gearing up to, but now you have to do more scouting and stay on your toes.
Even the way that you capture points has been changed for Company of Heroes 2. Previously, the only way to capture a point was to order a squad to take it, meaning you had to click the specific point and have a squad sit on it. This reduced their combat effectiveness, and if you weren’t paying attention the squad could be wiped out with ease. Company of Heroes 2 still allows you to order a squad to capture a point in this way, but alternatively they can just sit within a small radius of a point to take it. It’s a seemingly minor change, but it means that combat around points can become a lot more interesting, as each side is vying to see who can stay within proximity of a point long enough to capture it. It also means that things like booby traps or teller mines from Company of Heroes, which relied on the fact that the enemy was going to need to reach the point itself, won’t be effective and likely won’t be used in the same fashion they were before.
The Russian forces themselves obviously play a lot differently than the armies in the original game. It’ll take hours and hours of play to really get a hold on what makes them so special, but even during the short time I played a few things stood out. First of all, there’s conscript units. These large groups of infantry, normal citizens forced into the war, aren’t great at fighting, but are great for absorbing fire and can merge with other units to reinforce them on the field. For instance, if you had a machine gun crew down to one guy, you could use a conscript squad to bring them back up to their original size. These squads are cheap and efficient, and a bit unnerving when you realize how little value these peasants’ lives hold unless they’re used in specific ways.
Other units also stand out, feeling like variations on the past game’s units. The Maxim machine gun has a massive crew of six people and is a bit sluggish with its comparatively tight field of fire. The Russian sniper teams come in pairs instead of solo and are heavily clad in order to battle the blizzards that now sweep into levels and kill unprepared units. The Katyusha trucks fire Nebelwerfer-like rockets -- albeit a bit inaccurately -- from absurdly far away. The Russians even have an array of tanks, making an armored assault feel viable. Basically, they seem to have a bit of everything, with units that make them feel like an amalgamation of the original Company of Heroes' Wermacht and American forces.
The really striking thing about Company of Heroes 2 is the tone the game sets with its fantastic fidelity and animation. It’s easy to get caught up in the fact that I’m playing a game, but as I watch a group of conscripts struggle through heavy snow while taking machine gun fire, or throw themselves to the ground as an explosion comes a bit too close, I sometimes take a moment to reflect on the actual men and women that did that. These people endured some of the harshest conditions in the entirety of the war, and it’s great to see one of the best strategy franchises ever portraying their plight in vivid detail. It’s not often games succeed at being so much fun to play while simultaneously being intensely visceral in their portrayal of history.
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