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Company of Heroes 2
Company of Heroes 2 centers on immediate tactical choices: cover, TrueSight and combined arms make movement consequential. At ≈ $3.68 from 
Kinguin, the Steam PC version suits players seeking World War II strategy with single-player, co-op and competitive battles.
The base game supplies the Soviet campaign plus the Red Army and Wehrmacht Ostheer. Its visible player response and current price provide useful context for entering this real-time tactical strategy game. With 80%% positive from 69,087 reviews, the current $19.99 offer has clear player context.
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GGselCompany of Heroes 2 СНГ (КРОМЕ РФ)+ВЕСЬ МИР Steam КЛЮЧAll-time low ~ $1.00across Steam & third-party stores
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $3.682025-11Current Low Across Stores~ $17.88GameBilletvs. Historical Low+386%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Company of Heroes 2
Company of Heroes 2 is a World War II real-time strategy game where cover, sight lines and combined arms shape every frontline decision. Lead the Red Army through an Eastern Front campaign or fight with different armies in tactical battles. The Steam PC version offers single-player, multiplayer and co-op. TrueSight simulates line of sight; dynamic weather and destructible environments alter battles. Players rate it 80%% positive from 69,087 reviews.
Credits
Composer
Cris Velasco
Developer
Relic Entertainment · Feral Interactive (Mac) · Feral Interactive (Linux)
Publisher
Relic Entertainment · Feral Interactive (Mac) · Feral Interactive (Linux)
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$3.682025-11-21 · GameBilletBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Czech | Yes | Yes | — |
| French | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 5 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-28
02Before you buy
Modes
The Steam PC version offers a single-player campaign plus competitive and cooperative multiplayer.
Base-game content
The base game includes the Red Army and Wehrmacht Ostheer, along with an Eastern Front single-player campaign.
Tactical systems
TrueSight, cover, combined arms and dynamic weather shape tactical decisions.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the single-player campaign about?
It follows a Soviet commander on the Eastern Front and leads toward Berlin.
Which armies are in the base game?
The base game includes the Red Army and Wehrmacht Ostheer. Other factions belong to separate expansions.
Does it support multiplayer and co-op?
Yes. The Steam PC version supports single-player, multiplayer and co-op.
8.0
Overall Score
Graphics8.5
Audio8
Gameplay9
Story6
Content8
“An Eastern Front RTS that builds tactics out of sightlines, weather and cover — brilliant to play, merely passable to watch”
Our Verdict
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.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Really good RTS game, the campaign is excellent set during WW2 on the eastern front, trying to overcome the power of the nazi war machine and struggle with the harsh winters of Russia. With the added bonus of extra single player missions for dlc. Recommend to anyone that enjoys world war games or RTS games in general, hundreds of achievements and hours of fun, death and devastation. The multiplayer section of the game is addictive, allowing you to pit your wits against other players or CPU in 1v1 or 4v4 battles win or lose you will earn in game currency to purchase better doctrines, DLC, skins etc, a really great game to have and play. That been said there are a few flaws with the game, a couple of the achievements are no longer able to be unlocked since the game has change so much since it's release (and it doesn't look like they will fix this any time soon) and compared to the original CoH this fails to meet expectations. However the game is still excellent and well worth your money and your time.Show moreShow less
310.2 hours at review884 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
While being a sequel, Company Of Heroes 2 offers less content than the original game and has many holes that scream to be filled with future DLC releases. Many of the units simply feel like a re-skin; the Russians take the exact role the Americans did in the first game. All of the Russian units have a similar counterpart in the first game and yet CoH2 still manages to offer less variety in units than that first game, leaving certain battlefield roles completely missing. On CoH2's day of release it already had a gigantic collection of twenty six DLC packages totaling a whopping £42. Costing more than the game itself, the downloadable content added vehicle skins and access to five unique commanders which could have simply added to standard release. Downloadable content implies you are actually paying for something, however Company Of Heroes 2 manages to charge and give nothing in return. The five commanders that can be bought offer no new abilities, just remixing the existing content within the game, only changing the orders of abilities players can spend hard earned cash without adding a single drop of new content to the experience. For pre-ordering I had access to the new co-op “missions” known as theater of war; instantly I was unable to access most of this since it will be released as future DLC. These missions are meant to have a unique co-op focus, however they did little to bring anything fresh to the game: most of these simply being a skirmish with one or two unique abilities and a smaller unit variety then a standard skirmish. The main campaign does little to inspire beyond the first game. Consisting of fourteen missions about an hour each, they simply feel like a skirmish game except offering unique units, upgrades, and abilities which are not available during any other game mode. I found myself questioning why all of this had been removed from the other game modes. With poor dialogue, story, and boring missions that simply feel like tutorials you will feel little incentive to return for a second play-through. Multiplayer does little to improve as an unfair matchmaking system frequently creates unbalanced teams as well as giving players no choice in what they would like to play. If you want to play with random players, you lose choice over the map played as well as only having access to point control mode. Creating your own custom game denies you access to other players, and only allows you to invite friends which feels unnecessarily limiting. The new winter maps add new mechanics to the game in which infantry become exposed to the cold and risk freezing, while random blizzards limit speed and visibility that can quickly turn heavy skirmishes into silence and small raids. This welcome and unique design can really change the battlefield while making players adapt to the new low sight conditions however it soon loses its novelty after a few games. After a few maps I soon found that blizzards simply seem to slow the game down and add to unnecessary micromanagement of units. After hearing “Your men are freezing to death” I moved my camera to see an infantry squad stood one meter too far from a fire where they simply stood allowing themselves to freeze to death. After this happened a few times while I focused on the battle it just made winter maps soon feel like additional and unneeded “busy work.” With no other new game mechanics besides additional “busy work” it brings into question, “why should I choose Company of Heroes 2 over the first?” With the combat mechanics remaining the same of the first game I expected to find myself playing an almost identical game to the original but with additional content. However, after playing against the AI on many skirmish maps I soon realized that my choices were significantly more limited. All of the maps are very open, with little to no choke points to really plan any defensive tactics: I soon found myself getting slaughtered if I ever tried to play defensively. Defenses soon become useless as they are now easily flanked by speeding armor or even basic the infantry squad which pushes all players to play aggressively and use almost identical tactics. Do you like to play defensively and push forwards inch by inch? Tough luck. Want to focus mostly on support infantry? Tough luck. The only way you can win is tanks, immune to most damage and with all anti-tank weaponry so easily flanked. Every match becomes a race to build the first tank and with Germany armor being superior to the soviets in every possible way, except mobility, the Germans have a significant advantage on all maps. During a match you will eventually earn your first command point, giving you access to your custom selected commanders with each having five traits. At least one of these will be a passive ability that will add little to nothing to the battlefield. Two points will often give you access to unique units, with only two semi-unique units per commander it hardly changes how you decide to play against your opponent. Often these unique units are shared between many possible commanders further removing any roles or unique identity on the battlefield. Everyone builds the same units, everyone is forced to play the same aggressive tactics and as a result every game ends up playing out like the previous one. Losing teams do not have any chance to retake the battlefield against aggressive players and the winning team within the game can be seen within the first five minutes. Pros: +good campaign length of around ten or more hours +action focused RTS appeals to those who are not interested in most RTS games +weather elements are impressive for the first few game +cinematic combat provides impressive sights Cons: -a complete downgrade of the first game -high system requirements -overpriced and unnecessary release DLC, with more to come! -winning with defensive or support roles is impossible -the new commander system makes every battle the same -poor multiplayer system, removing all choice from players -predictable campaign story does nothing to entice the player -no reason to ever replay the campaign missions -content available for campaign but denied in all other game modes -skirmish and multiplayer maps offer no chance for a losing team to fight back Company of Heroes 2 remains a good game, the fun action-orientated strategy game remains satisfying and intense while able to appeal to players that are not familiar to the RTS genre. Though still an enjoyable experience it is a complete downgrade from the first release back in 2006. Seven years later fans are left with an overpriced game. DLC, and less content than the first release for a small graphical update. For these reasons I would not recommend CoH2 to those interested as the unique gameplay the game has to offer should look to the original Company of Heroes instead. Enjoy the read? Check out Analog reviews, for unbais gaming reviews. http://steamcommunity.com/groups/AnalogReviewsOfficial Edit: Simply improving grammar and sentence structure. Same text.Show moreShow less
60.3 hours at review3,981 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
(EDITED 7/27/14 FOR "ARMIES OF THE WESTERN FRONT" STANDALONE EXPANSION) Hello everyone, I just wanted to write this because I've seen all the negative reviews out there, and I have no idea what most of these people are talking about. I am a huge fan of the Company of Heroes franchise, and I have put many hundreds of hours into CoH1 both before and after if went on Steam. Not everything that the nay-sayers is wrong, but the amount of negative attention this game is getting is unfair to it, and I think that anyone who was a fan of VCoH should give it a chance. First, I will say that the game mechanics are nothing but improved. Infantry AI is much better, units can no longer be run over by a stray tank and destroy entire squads. Tanks can no longer just roll over an opponent without being supported. Infantry anti-tank abilities (available on all factions core units except the Oberkommando West) will very often damage a vehicles engine, slowing it down to the point where other anti-vehicle weapons can easily take them out. Artillery is dumbed down from the first game, with only a handful of on-map artillery options available. You will not be able to park calliopes outside of your opponents base and win the game with long range barrage weapons. These are all, in my eyes, improvements and make for a more exciting, balanced game. Navigating the game maps is slightly different now as well. A few things that stood out is how much less important bridges are. Terror doctrine in VCoH could esentially pick a bridge, firebomb it, and destroy it on demand if the munitions were availbable. Now, alternate (but less convenient) routes to the front are almost always available, and bridges can even be repaired before they are destroyed. Infantry can vault over low walls and obstacles too, which is just one more tool available to the player to get to the fight (or away from it) swifter. This also means troops can no longer be trapped on the wrong side of a sandbag wall, they can simply jump over to the other side. This is true for trenches as well, they can leap in and jump out without using the main entrance. (EDIT-WINTER MAPS REMOVED) While winter maps were not 100% removed, blizzard effects were removed on all maps. There are still places where you can fight in frozen conditions with heavy snow littering the ground and ice covering waterways, making new avenues for attack that are not present in summer. The removal of blizzards was a good decision on Relics part and shows how this game is still growing and changing. Blizzards allowed for very static gameplay by slowing down all units and encouraging long-range units to sit and camp, whereas the rest of the game demands that your forces be in constant motion, and the faster you can move the better. The true line of sight concept I mentioned is also a new improvement to the formula. Units can only see what is in front of them, and can no longer draw line of sight through walls, buildings, enemy vehicles, or smoke clouds, making smoke much more useful than it was in VCoH. This makes setting up ambushes and scouting considerably more important and exciting. It is a good feeling for an enemy tank to roll around a corner, only to find out that an infantry squad and an AT gun are in extremely close proximity to it. The infantry squad will almost certainly slow the vehicle with an AT grenade or panzerfaust, and the AT gun will take care of the rest. But not all was good on the eastern front, and the game did have the flaw of an overabuse of paid DLC. Relic has listened to its fans, and there is no more paid DLC commanders/skins/bulletins (the three prevalent multiplayer unlocks) that you cannot unlock by playing the game. Company of Heroes 2: Armies of the Western Front, unveiled a concept of "War Spoils", a stystem where players will earn random commanders, bulletins (which are static buffs for a specific unit type), and skins simply by playing for a set amount of time. War Spoils is a good idea, but it is poorly executed as the player does not have control over the drops they are getting. If you want to unlock a specific commander, it is very likely you will unlock three different commanders, four skins, and countless bulletins before you get the one you want. You also do not know how much you are progressing towards your next drop, and it does not seem to be connected to win/loss rating. Still, this formula is a radical improvement over buying those fancy commanders. If you want to play around with new units and tactics, now all you have to do is play more in stead of breaking your wallet out. Want to unlock that German winter camo for your heavy tanks? Better go kill more Communists. Blow up your opponent in style for the low low price of... who knows how much time spent playing the game you bought! The war spoils system is nice, but ultimately I think people will still pay for commanders rather than work for them, as it can take some time. A good improvement on this system would be making it so you can choose what to work towards unlocking as well as the elimination of duplicate war spoils drops, which are by and large useless with the exception of certain bulletins, though even most duplicate bulletins do not function. All this aside, the game itself is well worth its cost, and is definitely worth looking into for any Company of Heroes veteran, or anyone interested in real time strategy games or World War II history. Armies of the Western Front adds the OKW and American forces into the game, and both these armies bring new soldiers and vehicles (not to mention commanders) to the table, and demand new strategies from Whermacht and Soviet players to combat them. The unit emotes are all great, the sound effects are nice and authentic, and the checks and balances of the game make you end up using every weapon in your arsenal to crush your opponent, resulting in good-looking, authentic armies. The gameplay is fun, it is pretty, the auto-matching multiplayer will usually find you games in less than a minute, and the multiplayer is competitive and diverse enough to keep you coming back. I give it a 9.5 out of 10 and highly reccomend this game. [EDIT 12/26/15] A lot has changed in this game since I originally wrote this review. I have tried to go back over it and change content as is necessary, but tried to maintain its intergrity. The biggest differences are the removal of blizzards on winter maps, the overhaul to the OKW, which was a good idea but still needs some work as of this edit, and the introduction of the British forces in multiplayer, which brought a lot of new units to the table and changed the games balance.Show moreShow less
1,403.6 hours at review856 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I have to write this review as it troubles me greatly the way that SEGA are distributing games. I like Company of Heroes 2 and I like playing it just as I like the Total War series but I do not like the precedent that is being set through DLC and need to make others aware of it. I am reviewing this game on the basis that it is full price and all the DLC is full price, which no sane person would pay! Please, please wait until the game and all its content are on sale to buy it else you feel like you've had a raw deal. I bought this game for £10 from a supermarket when it was on special offer and the deals Steam puts on can undercut that. I felt I had got a good deal but if I had paid £29.99 I certainly would have felt cheated. I'm from a generation of gamers who used to play on 4 colour 8-bit computers where you had to wait for games to load via a tape player that you bought from Tandy. I've seen the development of PC games from Doom to the present day and it was a sad fact that the internet was double edged. We had good things like forums, multiplayer servers, modders and the publisher could release updates for the game. Then the bad like publishers releasing buggy, unfinished games which would then be patched later. Now we can add to that the insidious practice of DLC (down loadable content) that we must pay for to use. Now I'm a realist, some DLC such as extra levels or new units may be worth paying for where it adds to the game and its here to stay. SEGA aren't the only distributors to sell DLC but in the case of Company of Heroes 2 they do let you know what you haven't got! Let me explain. So you've just paid £29.99 for this and checked out the DLC from the store page and see that there's some Theatres of War and an add on for Ardennes Assault (this is really a separate game and I won't cover that in detail here but it is a very good campaign). So what do you get for £29.99? You get a base Soviet campaign, one theatre of war and some commanders, skins and intel bulletins for skirmish/multiplayer (more on that later). So you have a relativity engaging single player campaign but for multiplayer you quickly realise you've just been sold a 'starter pack' if you will and you're lacking a hell of a lot. That doesn't mean it isn't there, it just you can't use it! On the main menu screen you are hit with adverts for DLC - Theatres of War, Ardennes Assault and Fox company rangers to try and get you to purchase them. It seems the game delights in showing you what you don't have. So you click on the store page and you are taken to options you cannot see through Steam, you have to see them through the game, those are: Commanders, Skins and Faceplates, all with associated costs. Then you thin, what have I actually paid for other than the short campaign? A good Question and the answer raises more questions! The theatres of war are like mini campaigns which take place on the maps from multiplayer and some are very challenging but they aren’t worth the full price of the game. You look at the cost for all the Theatres of War DLC (Southern Fronts £2.99, Stalingrad £6.99 & Case Blue £6.99), total of £16.97. Now comes the gut wrenching part, the cost for all those bits of DLC for multiplayer. For those who aren’t familiar with the Company of Heroes games one of their traits is it allows you to select a commander who has specific abilities that you can use to gain a tactical advantage during the game. This can be the ability to call in airstrikes, off map artillery, special units or uniquely powerful armoured units such as Tiger tanks. In the original game there were three commanders (Infantry, Airborne and Armoured). In this game there are lots, I don’t know how many but there’s a forum about it somewhere. Initially when you buy the game you get a basic number of commanders for the Soviets and the Werhmacht. (I got a message that as a legacy player I’d unlocked some so I have a number that weren’t ‘unlocked’ with the base game). These are critical for your experience on multiplayer and skirmish as the computer can use commanders you don’t have access to and it will. Likewise, online players may have access to that German commander who can call in a Tiger Ace (a Tiger tank with full veterancy level) and you don’t have a commander who can call in an equally powerful unit. This makes the game unbalanced. OK, so I talked about ‘unlocking’ commanders and earlier on I mentioned intel bulletins. Intelligence Bulletins change the mechanics of the game and you can select three from a vast number of options. Some are subtle such as giving machine guns a 2% faster rate of fire and some have a greater impact such as giving tanks 20% greater accuracy. You can’t buy these through DLC (that’s no loss as there’s already plenty of that) you have to ‘unlock’ them. You unlock more commanders, intel bulletins, vehicle skins and other goodies via the war spoils system. This essentially involves grinding away for hours on skirmish matches to ‘win’ random war spoils. There’s no logic or pattern to what you get, when you get it or how many get. For instance after one 20 minute game I won two war spoils and after one 1 hour game I got none. Plus you can get repeats like trading cards except you can’t trade them with anyone. So intel bulletins and commanders are classified as common, scarce and rare. The rare types being the more useful and more powerful. ‘Rubbish’ you cry, I want the special commanders, can’t I download them? Yes you can, at a price through that store page accessed via the game. Now I’m not saying that anyone would buy all the commanders, or that you would even need to, especially as many just have different combinations of the same abilities. But just say you’re a completest, well there are: 1 x starter bundle of four commanders at £6.49, 8 commanders at £2.79/each, 8 commanders at £2.99/each and 10 commanders at £1.99/each. Total cost = £72.63. I’m not finished with the DLC here though, no, you can also alter the cosmetic appearance of the game with vehicle skins (different camouflage paint jobs) and for a full set you need three (one for light vehicles, one for medium and one for heavy). Now I’m not big on paying for cosmetic changes but just say you wanted to as they were there and you wanted them all. There are two starter packs (one Soviet and one German) at £4.79/each. There are then a whopping 40 extra skins at £1.59/each. Total cost = £73.18 You can also change the control bar face plate if you so desired and there are four options at £1.59/each. Total cost = £6.36 Then there are the Western armies (USA and OKW) at £14.99 that you will want for multiplayer. Total cost of DLC = £184.13, yes £184.13!!! But you say, surely you wouldn’t download all the cosmetic stuff, just what you want. This is true, but it’s not the point. You have paid £29.99 for a game that is missing fundamental aspects to make it playable in multiplayer and the only way to get it is to pay more, a lot more. I would never part with my hard earned cash to buy commanders which should be in the game I’ve bought. In fact they are in the game, I just can’t use them. Fix the war spoils system, reward players who are very good and very skilful with the better commanders, don’t fleece us! That’s why I can’t recommend this game, stuff the gameplay, it doesn’t matter, no game is worth £214.12 (DLC cost plus base game cost, all full price) to access all of its features, not one, ever! Buy this game when it’s on offer, but please boycott paying for what’s in the game already. Don’t buy the commanders, even those you really want or need. £2.99 may not sound like a lot but you can often buy a FULL game for that on a Steam offer. You’re paying to use a single special unit that the computer can use at will. It sucks.Show moreShow less
25.7 hours at review1,960 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Thanks, HumbleBundle.Show moreShow less
0.6 hours at review855 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
2020 update, balance is still non existent, blobbing, OP units, nerfing of certain factions or units that make them significantly weaker or borderline useless, and the pathfinding is still your worst enemy, the pathfinding and AI in this game is truly something else entirely, out of this world bad. Edit is now on top. game is still a biased steaming pile of ♥♥♥♥, do not get it unless you get it bargain style at kinguin DOT net, G2a DOT com, somewhere even cheaper is best, and do only get it if you have stockholm syndrome and like to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the a**hole by B'S developers. That is all folks, hope to see you ingame. Greetings guy that got used to eating ♥♥♥♥. Stockholm syndrome dude. Earlier I would recommend this game for being fun and it being able to provide so many hours, but playing this game from launch to this day, the game has become unbalanced and it is way to DLC heavy, if you wish to win or stand a fair competitive chance in playervsplayer online you will have to connect your credit card to the pc. I am sad to see that this great and beloved franchise has been turned into a cash grind, I will not recommend this game unless you have a special interest, plan to play with friends, or get it on sale. *edit* I forgot to add how brutaly horrible pathfinding is, how much the company refuses to listen to it's fans and players complaints, and that they are so amazingly greedy that you have to buy 1 camo for light, then the same for medium, and the same for heavy units. Fair enough they are optional, but 1.99EU for 1 camo, that to use on all vehicle classes you have to buy a total of 3 times for the same skin. I wish they would take a look at the overwhelmingly large amount of negative amounts, just on their storepage here in steam. UPDATE they have removed the ''paid'' commanders and introduced some balance patches, but the truth is simply that instead of focusing on making additional factions and the Ardenne Assault campaign they should have focused ESPECIALLY on the horrible pathfinding of this game, say you have a tank that is attacked from the front, you specifically order it to back up with it's front towards the enemy, and now it starts doing donuts while being hammered to pieces. And the balance is still pretty crap, I preffered the beta version of the game as there was a significant difference between the teams in weakness and strenght for better or worse, now they are more ''equal'' in how they play and do for ''balancing reasons'' which takes away the different styles of gameplay to a certain degree. German squads that are significantly smaller then their counterparts still get wiped by random mortar or tanks shell, there is no HE equivalent for german AT or tanks, which is pretty lacking in anti infantry capabilities unless you buy armor made specifically to target infantry but are very weak against tanks. There are some obvious unit changes that should be done, for example US TD have great guns and should have good speed and range, but paper armor however they can easily take 2-3 hits from panther to King Tiger. Early game axis has poor armor capabilities unlike the other factions with M5 or T70, the Luchs 2 is absolute crap against anything bigger then a halftrack, and there are plenty of units that should be added to the different teams to create more balance and variation to the unique attributes of each faction. Significant imbalances in artillery when Axis is compared to Allies, allies are significantly stronger in that department, and when it comes to fortifications the Allied fortifications cannot be decrewed only artillery pieces, whereas it is ridiculously easy to decrew or destroy Axis fortifications, the brits can activate brace(push a magic button that makes them invincible for a short time at no cost) and cannot as previously stated be decrewed, whereas as axis fortifications can easily be destroyed. If you played the first CoH and have it still I recommend that over CoH2, but CoH2 can still be fun when played with friends, just try to not get annoyed by obvious imbalance or absolutely retarded pathfinding.Show moreShow less
570.5 hours at review1,778 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Being a huge fan of the CoH series and a top tier player I aim to give a balanced review and dispell the undeserved negative user reviews. Please note this is my first proper review and any feedback is appreciated =). Do not be fooled by the hateful meta critic user reviews that score the game incredibly low. These are all largely due to patriotic Russians who exaggerate and claim the devlopers are Nazis as the campagin portrays the Soviet Union in a bad light. One such scene they are particularly angry about is when retreating russian soldiers are being shot down by their own machine guns. Granted Relic could have portrayed these horros of war better so that they could not be misinterpreted but they didn't set out to shame an entire nation. What the campagin really shows is the the story of the war through one man's eyes, showing the great bravey of the typical russian soldier under a ruthless poltical system and an equally terrifying invading German army. Which probably took more courage to do than that of soldiers from other countries. For those who worry about Pay to win I can assure you it's entire nonsense. None of the new content is aimed to give players an edge in multiplayer. Obviously when it is first introduced there might be some balance issues here and there but these are quickly resolved. The idea behind DLC is to give players more varitey, be that with skins or commanders it's down to your personal preference and you are no way forced to buy it to be able to compete. I can say that although CoH2 does not possess that same unique feeling that vcoh had, it is still a remarkable and incredibly fun game that continues to get better with each passing month. I have personally played over 600 hours on the beta and current version combined and I still find new ways to play and each game is never the same. You have to remember that the orginal CoH series has had 7 years of patching and improvements whereas CoH2 has only been out for less than a year. Therefore I believe it's unfair to judge the sequel so harshly at this stage. Within that time period the developers have added a huge range of content including; Steam Workshop with user created maps and mods, offical developer created maps, new units, commanders, leaderboards, chat rooms and with plenty more on the way. Notable improvements over the original include: Better Graphics, Bulletins, Variety in choices that makes you stand out from the crowd ie commanders, skins faceplates etc, New Features like Cold Tech and True Sight which add more tactical elements. For instance you must now keep your troops warm during a blizzard by placing them near a fire or in a house otherwise they will freeze to death. Now on to the game's flaws. Currently I believe the developers are pre-occuiped in bringing out more dlc content then spending the most time balancing the game and improving performance. Fair enough that they have to make money but I'd much rather they focused on tweaking the current game first then adding dlc like theatre of war missions. The variety in commanders is great and all but loads of the abilities have been reused in other commanders which takes away the uniqueness of certain commanders. Theres still quite some work to do before it can be considered a proper ESport as the replay viewer still needs additional features however it is constantly improving. Compared to something like Starcraft 2, CoH2 just doesn't have the player base or the resources unlike blizzard. I honestly think that if relic promoted the game and advertised it properly it would have generated a lot more interested. As it happens the advertising around the launch date was literally non-existent. Conclusion Score: 8/10 Current State Although this game has got a way to go before it can be considered to be a worthy sequel to the first, I believe that over time it will get there and even surpass it's predecessor. Relic has been listening to user feedback and many of the new features are a result of this. So if your either a fan of the old game or looking to try out a proper real time strategy then look no further. I cannot recommend this game enough.Show moreShow less
602.2 hours at review782 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
So just what do you get with the free version of the game? You start clicking on everything, and there are a lot of little "lock" icons everywhere, that's for sure. But wait, there's a campaign that's not locked. So start it up. Go to save your progress - sorry, you can't save or load, those are locked. So if you want to play 5 minutes before paying $60.00, this is the game for you! Sega is joining the list of companies with extremely unethical business practices that shouldn't even be allowed here on Steam. (Paradox, EA, and Ubisoft are the others.) I'd suggest boycotting everything Sega does, I will certainly never buy another one of their games. So why would Sega think this practice won't hurt sales? My complete guess would be that they know that as soon as there are enough negative reviews about it, that Steam will censor the reviews anyway so most people won't ever see them anyway. And it's extremely unethical of Steam to support companies like this as well...Show moreShow less
0.1 hours at review1,101 people found this helpful
Received for free
RecommendedSteam player
An excellent Sequel to an Excellent RTS. It refines on the gameplay of the previous game while adding in new elements like truesight and vaulting which at first sight may seem minimal in effect but as you play the game reveal themselves to have a much greater impact and offer a great deal of tactical options. The Campaign is fun. Nice and long. But it does suffer a bit in my opinion from the fact that it tries to cover the entire thing from Barbarossa to Berlin and ends up being a bit unfocused. Personally think it would have benefitted much from focusing on a single event like Operation Bagration. Multiplayer as always is a tricky thing in regards to balance as things generally change as new ideas are mixed in. Was with CoH and so it is with CoH2. But overall balance is great there's always an option for a clever player and generally i don't feel like you're shoe-horned into a specific response. So overall. A most recommendable game and a must play if you were to ask me.Show moreShow less
501.4 hours at review576 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
To those looking at my hours played and saying "but you've played such and such a time how can you give this a negative review?". To you I say that 75% of those TOTAL hours has been farming for War Spoils, which you will learn about further down in the review. Honestly buy Company of Heroes 1 with all of the DLC and you will have this game but with less visual fidelity but FAR better gameplay and on top of that more polish and less heavy handed DLC peddling. The campaign is fine though there is one mission in particular that honestly I could have done without. The game itself and the core mechanics are no longer what they were in COH, they are stripped and resold as overpriced DLC. Add to that the fact that the developers have simply given up on this project or rather fixing it and have instead taken the EA road of putting DLC on the fast track priority list. The engine has some serious issue and regardless of your rig's capability it will chug every time for the most ridiculous reasons if ANY reasons at all, it is simply a poorly optimized mess that the developers continue to screw with and make worse. While I'm not the only one complaining about how poorly this game runs my current PC meets or exceeds the RECOMENDED specs for this game yet I have nothing but trouble with it and that’s running most graphics settings on low or medium! The glaring game engine problems don't just stop when you leave the match, the game has a serious issue with "forgetting" your graphical settings whenever the hell it feels like it. You'll boot up a match quickly after taking a few weeks off and you get into the match and you realize the game resolution is set to 66% and low on all settings, whoever at Relic designed the game this way needs to be fired because this in the year 2015 is inexcusable. Your unit’s AI has to be some of the most sub par that has ever been put into an RTS game that I have ever seen, the COH path finding is legendary by now because of how poorly your units navigate the map. It was significant in COH1 but in 2 there appear to be no fixes or updates to the AI and on top of that they continue to make the same countless mistakes that will get themselves killed. Retreating units often go out of their way to make wide paths of retreat INTO enemy lines rather then back through areas which were cleared. Another step back in this title compared to the first one was that if a grenade lands next to a squad of infantry they will stand on it and end up killing an entire squad, where as in COH1 at times the AI would automatically spread out a bit in order to mitigate the damage done to the squad. Tanks regularly show their rear and side armor when retreating or maneuvering around which also happened in COH1 but again you’d expect IMPROVEMENTS for a full priced second title but alas there are few if any. The advertized "feature" the Relic likes to tout in this game is the "true sight" which on paper means that your units can't just see through the fog of war within their normal vision radius. Well in practice it is VERY different, a full squad of 5 or 6 infantry units can not see around a 1 foot wide tree with no under growing branching on its trunk. That single bush that most people would be able to see right though? Yeah apparently the people that Relic hire are outright blind or have extreme cases of near sightedness because squads and vehicles can literally be only small bushes or singular trees apart and they will never know. None of this is an exaggeration mind you; you can hide an entire squad or armored column behind a single fern. This also extends to all unit vision cones which are lacking even more so then they were in COH1; that dedicated long range tank hunter that should be used at long range, yeah it has the visual range of a new born child. Relic-SEGA changed the rank rewards and changed them over to something they called "War Spoils" which is a completely RNG system with no way to reliably get anything let alone something that should have been unlocked upon purchase. Doctrines are now locked behind what is essentially a pay wall because unless you want to grind for quite literally thousands of hours just to get a single doctrine or camo then you'll have to fork over some serious cash. The best part besides the system being so obviously designed to push players to give up and BUY what they are in essence owed is that the loot system can also drop duplicates which are utterly useless as there is no way to combine or sell them off for something slightly more useful. So on top of the system being totally fixed and random you also can get I've seen players complain about having 5 of a single bulletin or more and you have no uses for multiples past 3 even then it takes up that loot space that could have been something better. It is an absolute Scheme that was calculated for the benefits of Relic-SEGA and not the players who bought the game. The fact that this system was added a year or two AFTER the game was actually released proves this to be quite the obvious fact. They have made no attempts to fix the glaring issues despite a now 84 page thread about the subject. The "War Spoils" system is so inconsistant and obviously broken that you will get one player who gets nothing but Doctrins, skins nd rare everything while others get almost nothing even after grinding for DAYS at a time all to unlock something that came WITH the game. The evidence of this is in this single thread that a mod put up to cut down on the amount of complaints about the loot system: http://steamcommunity.com/app/231430/discussions/0/43099711972537578/ Keep in mind future buyer, that any of the Doctrine/Commander, camos and such are already bought and paid for when you purchased the game or the US/OKW DLC. They are NOT EXTRA DLC, Relic/SEGA is hiding the content that we already paid for behind an extremely unforgiving grind wall or a pay wall. Is there more stuff to do and just more content then COH sure but it comes at the cost of gameplay balances, game stability and and overpriced paywall or just a paywall PERIOD. I am honestly not sure what happened to the Relic I knew, the Relic who made the Homeworld series but this new Relic is filled with nothing but the worst kind of people for developing games, a shell of its former self for certain. If you must given them your money give as little as possible, wait for 70 to 80% off and you won't feel as ripped off.Show moreShow less
715.5 hours at review953 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.