One thing’s for sure, the Russian front was an incredibly bleak place in 1941, and the narrative of COH2 underlines it with Russian soldiers shot for retreating or disobeying orders. In between the missions, there’s some cutscenes with decent acting, and I enjoyed that most of them were extremely short, teasing you with a brief introduction before getting you back into the action of commanding troops. The campaign is framed around a Russian lieutenant reliving the war through an interview with his former commanding officer.

The fun of COH2 comes from using position and cover to your advantage, and in this way it felt true to how I imagine small arms combat was during the period. Specialized units like engineers – able to plant mines, explosives or construct buildings – and shock troops – grenadiers, essentially – are valuable, and the micromanagement of merging untrained conscripts into these units once casualties are suffered will occupy most of your time. Cover is essential, and you’ll find yourself moving troops between sandbag walls and into buildings just to survive.

All the combat happens automatically, with shots being fired almost continuously. You move groups of troops around the battlefields which vary from fields and farmhouses to bombed-out urban ruins. Set on the Eastern front of World War II, you’ll play as either the Russians or the Germans. In contrast, the long-awaited sequel doesn’t alter much from its predecessor’s formula, and that’s why COH2 delivers an amazingly fun experience. You don’t have to put resource-collecting units on the map? That’s crazy talk! Of course, COH was incredibly successful precisely because it broke the norm. When the original Company of Heroes came out in 2006, it changed a lot of gamer’s perceptions of what “real-time strategy” meant.

Company heroes 2 review