Company of Heroes 2 and Rome 2 Total War are both 50% off today. Opinions?
On CoH 2: It's very recognizable as CoH. I'm probably 6 or so missions into the SP campaign. The story is trash. It's not compelling, it's just a lot of stereotypes about Russian command throwing away lives. There's not a lot of sense of place, as most missions are "DEFEND THIS POINT COMRADE" "HOLD OUT UNTIL VE SAY YOU'RE DONE COMRADE" "OK, NOW VE MUST PULL BACK COMRADE" The main character is just kind of angrily disagreeing with his interrogator, going on and on about how much worse Russia made the battle. It's in stark contrast to the story from CoH, where you're not made to feel bad about winning. Whatever historical truth or accuracy there is in the portrayal, it's one note for the most part. My favorite part:
When your end of mission objective becomes to rescue the main character after he's been trapped in a rubble collapse outside the defense zone. You roll your units up there and defend his position against a ton of German armor while your engineers dig him out. On returning to base, the commanding officer goes "Oh, you disobeyed orders and left your post? Have all these men executed before we move out."
Company of Heroes, indeed.
Anyways, gameplay wise there's some variance over the first. A higher reliance on click abilities, for one. The cap feels slightly lower although maybe that's because you can summon conscripts at pretty much any time to fill out your pop cap. Battles get suitably intense, sometimes to the point where I question if there's scripting to ensure my guys don't die under that kind of firepower. Order 227 can basically be ignored. It only triggers in missions when it's part of the story, or if you've summoned a conscript squad. The assumption made is that you'll be summoning conscripts when everything is falling apart and you WANT to retreat your units. If things have reached that point, you've already kind of fucked up pretty bad. The Russian Winter mechanic has only showed up a couple times. An entire mission level introducing it was pretty miserable. In combat, it basically requires you to cluster your guys around cover (cover protects from the wind and stops them from losing their heat value) and makes positioning a little more annoying, because when cover gets destroyed you're trying to pack 3 units around one dinky piece of cover so they don't freeze.
I imagine these mechanics get more play in later missions, as I'm not that far in. Haven't touched MP or the map editor. Generally, I haven't been grabbed by it like I was the first, in terms of story or gameplay. Maybe that's nostalgia, maybe it's my dislike of the story coloring the rest of my perception, or maybe it's that gameplay is very familiar. I'm not saying it's a bad game, but I got it at $20 and have some buyer's remorse.
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Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1476252 times)