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Monday, July 01, 2013

(Spoilers) Company of Heroes 2: Second 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. ***

Another day, another bunch of hours burned playing this. It looks like it was just "first day blues" -- I usually hate brand new games on my first day of playing. Maybe it's the learning curve or unfamiliarity with it. And there's also the chance that the first few levels are usually forced tutorials that strip things down. Regardless, I am liking CoH 2 way more now.

Single-player and Stalingrad
In my first post, I wrote about how I'm only playing the single-player campaign where you play as the Russians against the Germans. So it looks like most of the game may be focused in and around the battle of Stalingrad. I'm only half a dozen levels in, so we'll see.

More Levels: Still no Tanks
I continued with the level where you have to keep your troops from freezing to death. After a few more tries, I got the hang of it, and managed to make it far enough that I got to commandeer a half-track. That made things much easier, especially after I got a second one. The level progressed as a capture the base or flag challenge as it progressed.

The next two or three levels were a bit more interesting. If I recall correctly, at least one of the maps was urban, and the first involved capturing resource points. I started from a base, had mostly infantry and was allowed to build half-tracks and anti-tank guns. It was also the level where I finally learned to stop picking up every dropped heavy machine gun on the ground. A bunch of units were lost because I couldn't reposition or get them up in time when they were being shelled. Tanks were given part way through, but I still couldn't make them. This was a great level because I started playing offense, but it turned into a defense game against a ton of German units including tanks near the end.

One level later, I think, and I was still inside a city and had to go secure resource points with snipers everywhere -- freaking annoying. The good thing is that fully exposed light armored cars and half-tracks are safe from sniper fire for the most part. Same thing, I secured resource points, then there was a major counterattack from tanks and half-tracks part way through. That got very annoying because they seemed to be coming from everywhere and I had moved all my units to focus on one point. All of my anti-tank guns were pointed in the wrong direction, same for heavy machine guns. That devolved into a reinforcements spam or horde. No, no friendly tanks.

One thing I noticed so far is that it seems like the Germans don't make more units after you kill them even though they have a fully functional base. It'd be nicer and funner if they did. The final part involves me just walking into their base and finishing everything off.

I left off losing in the next level because I missed the time limit on reaching the objective -- again. There were a few mobile assault guns (tank-ish) given to me part way through this level. More tomorrow.


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