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Saturday, July 06, 2013

(Spoilers) Company of Heroes 2: Final Impressions

***SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers may be found in the post below about VARIOUS ITEMS. And I'm going to add in a bit of filler text here to limit how much of the main article gets shown in a preview. That should take care of most of it. Hopefully. And away we go. SPOILER WARNING. ***

I swear, this is the last one, then I might put an actual review of the single-player portion of the game. If you haven't heard, I suck at multiplayer strategy games, so I'm not even going to try that.

Snipers
This is where I last left off: a level playing as Polish partisan snipers with minimal resources. It was okay after finishing it, but I was honestly dreading having to get through this one over the past week. Essentially, I got three sniper units and I went around the map wiping out German camps. There was no armor to contend with, just trucks and half-tracks that would explode if the driver was killed by a sniper -- kind of lame. Near the end, I got access to "regular" infantry with machine guns and anti-tank weapons. It was only a squad though and I only used them for 5 minutes before the level ended.

Capture the Fort
I may have screwed up the order of the levels here, but this one was a lot of fun. It was based in an urban environment and I went back to controlling Soviet forces. The goal was, like many other levels, to go from one end of the map to the other, capturing control points along the way. Except this time, I had full access to tanks from the start and the level was based around two forts: one outer and one inner fort. Another interesting thing was that there were friendly Soviet forces under a different commander (i.e. you no touch) attacking the fort at the same time. There were a lot of enemy tanks too, which made this one a bit more interesting.

Encirclement
The focus of this level felt like it was back onto infantry again even though I had access to tanks. It was based in a forest with a town in the center. My approach was to use one group of tanks and one group of infantry with a support vehicle or two. In this level, I was supposed to encircle a town, which really just meant attacking everything along the left and right sides of the map and leaving the town in the center alone. At the end, the garrison tried to break out and my two groups had to keep them from getting out. The most important lesson learned was that I shouldn't send engineers in to repair my tanks while they are being attacked. Woops.

Last Level: Berlin
Okay, finally made it to the end. I think the last level was mission number 13-ish. I don't recall losing so many units before in any previous level. This one was completely urban and was based on the final assault on the Reichstag. Full support was available including tanks, air support, and bombardments from my own mortars and assault guns. However, because it was urban with narrow streets and German fortifications with 88mm anti-tank guns everywhere, my tanks either got bogged down or killed quickly. This meant having to use a lot of infantry and bombardments. I probably lost 4 or 5 heavy tanks trying my usual armor only approach before I focused on infantry. Very tough level, but a lot of fun.


Related
Company of Heroes 2: Single-player Portion Review
Company of Heroes 2: Single-player First Impressions
Company of Heroes 2: Second Impressions
Company of Heroes 2: Third Impressions