This campaign.... is really not fun at all. CoH campaigns have always been fairly scripted affairs but generally you always had a nice amount of ways to approach a situation, you were given good options in terms of units and weapons available, and it was compelling and fun.
For example, I remember you had to defend Carentan in the original CoH campaign. There's an almost identical mission in this one. In the Carentan mission it was fairly scripted as in every few minutes a gigantic wave would come and you'd have to evacuate to the next defensive line. However you had access to all sorts of stuff and you had plenty of time to plan your defense. You could lay mines and build bunkers and as many AT guns, snipers, etc. as you wanted. When you finally win you feel awesome because all your tactics and planning came together and the defense was hard since you had to defend against everything! Then you had to push your way back out!
In the CoH 2 version, you are thrown into the thick of it immediately... you ONLY HAVE CONSCRIPTS who literally only have rifles. Well... you also get one heavy machinegun too. Woop de doo. The only time they let you build things is after you've retreated to your base and even then you barely get any sort of things to use at all. You get... rifles... more rifles... and some more rifles. Oh and anti-tank mines and conveniently placed AT guns. So you defend against waves that just so happen to be easily killed by the handful of things you're allowed to get. Occasionally artillery will hit but you get giant red signals telling you where they'll land so you can just walk your troops away and suffer no casualties. After all that boring sitting there looking at Germans mindlessly running to their deaths, you're rewarded by a gigantic wave of free tanks which you use to win with literally no problems. You could just select all the tanks, right click the top of the map, then go make some tea cause you'll win.
It's so mind-numbingly boring!
This is basically an RTS rollercoaster, except the spectacle isn't very spectacular. I'm not someone who hates on-rails gameplay but come on... at least make interesting stuff happen!
Here's it's just Relic overusing horrible Russian accents and painting the Russians as the supreme evil of all evils. They keep trying to play up the "we had no choice we had to sacrifice millions of Russians to defend against the highly trained and super German soldiers" but literally every mission you can kill double if not triple your number of soldiers so easily. In the tutorial mission my Guards rifle squad had over 310 kills. I didn't even do anything special I just followed the on-screen prompts. Then you'd have the situations where enemy German soldiers would get obliterated by grenades but your own conscripts could nom on grenade shots to the face.
Then you've got that whole cliched "tortured soldier getting interrogated" as the central plot mechanic. It's stupid Relic. I'm glad they're not handling the next Homeworld if this is the best they can do with such a huge number of material when it comes to the Eastern Front. They could literally have made the entire campaign just about Stalingrad and it would have been awesome.
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Topic: Company of Heroes 2 - The Eastern Front (Read 20554 times)