Company of Heroes 2

A point on the timeline: one of 2013's most ambitious WWII strategy games

Placed back on the 2013 timeline, Company of Heroes 2 was one of the most technically ambitious WWII strategy games of its year. Behind that 80-point critical average is a clear report card: play, visuals and multiplayer drew broad high marks, while the single-player staging and launch-era optimization were docked again and again. It is not a flawless game, and it never tries to pass as one. But where it cared most — tactical depth — it reached a level almost nobody of its era touched, and that is the lens through which it should be judged. The campaign and the cutscenes are the price of admission; the systems are the reason you stay. A decade of competitive play has sanded the rough edges off and left the core intact, and the result is a game that reads very differently in hindsight than it did on a launch-day scorecard. The 80 was fair for what reviewers met in 2013; the systems underneath have aged better than the number suggests, because mechanics this sturdy do not date the way a cutscene does.

The card it cannot be dealt out of

Look back now and that pairing of TrueSight and dynamic weather still has not been truly reproduced. Imitators borrow the skin of capture-and-cover, or the shape of weather, but very few drive the information gap this far — the moment-to-moment terror of not knowing what waits behind the next treeline. That is its hardest card to replace, and even StarCraft II, running the symmetrical-macro road, cannot reach it; they are two species of RTS, one measured in macro and ceiling, the other in position, vision and judgement. Neither is better, but only one of them makes you afraid of an empty field.

When Iron Harvest arrived in 2020 it rebuilt this company-level cover framework almost wholesale and was widely called its spiritual successor, which only underlines the weight of the design. It became a benchmark later games had to either dodge or salute, and most of them quietly chose to salute — proof that what Relic built on the Eastern Front was not just enjoyable, but structurally hard to improve upon.

Who should buy it, who should not, and which version

Who is it for? Players who want a slower tempo, who prize flanking and footwork over click speed, who weigh tactics above hands — they will find a depth here that nothing else quite offers, especially anyone willing to live in the multiplayer where a single squad decides a match. Who should steer clear? Anyone chasing high-APM, big-army symmetrical macro will find it too slow and too sparse; anyone here for a top-tier single-player story will most likely walk away let down, because the narrative only clears the passing line; and players with no taste for the East's heavy subject matter need not force it.

As for the version, hold out for the base game plus all three expansions. Only with The Western Front Armies, Ardennes Assault and The British Forces in hand do you unlock every faction's full competitive content; buy the base alone and you miss most of the multiplayer and the entire western single-player run, which is the real shame. As the true successor to the 2006 original, this is a solid evolution rather than an outright revolution — but for that still-uncopied dance of sightlines and weather, it remains, all these years on, one book a tactical-RTS lover cannot leave off the shelf.