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Company of Heroes 2 (Steam) free on the Humble Bundle store
- Thread starter mantis
- Start date
Humble has really been generous with the freebies recently, its like... what, one a week at the moment?
After many updates it's good but it took a while to get there and it still performs relatively poorly while not looking stunning.
Cautiously optimistic for 3 but hope they don't bring the commander deck building microtransaction shit back.
It is the most detailed RTS on the market after all these years. It performs adequate: if you prefer higher than 60 FPS, then you need to make reductions in quality. If you don't mind the game dropping below 60 FPS, you can leave settings on high. Part of the reason why the game is not well optimized is because it is built more like a shooter: bullets and shells are rendered, everything has their own lines of sight, hit chances or trajectories. Units leave their footsteps in the snow, tanks alter the terrain driving over it. Sturmtiger reloading has the crew exit the chassis and manually moving the shell using the crane. The level of detail which went into CoH2 is remarkable, because the competition (Dawn of War 3, Normandy 44, Starcraft II, Halo Wars 2) does not have it.
It has the second most active (RTS levels active) community after Starcraft.
I played the first and second games for 500+ hours each so I certainly know what hey look like. The first game was insane for 2006, the second was underwhelming. It's more detailed, but definitely doesn't look "7 years better", nor does its performance feel great even on a 980ti and i5 4670. This is not a controversial statement, really, the technical aspects of 2 were not and are not great.
You should give some examples of RTS games which are more detailed than CoH2, because the planes crashing in CoH2 have the better sense of speed and impact than Battlefield 1.
I am going to agree with the statement that the performance is not great: it is not well optimized compared to Starcraft II. But the reasons why it isn't as well optimized aren't just "bad optimization", the game has way more going both in terms of details and under-the-hood mechanics.
I'm not concerned about up close super detail, but the games simulation is not notably better than its own predecessor with the exception of blizzards. Maps aren't bigger, loitering planes were in both, unit counts are maybe slightly bigger for soviet but comparable for Germany. The crashes look nicer I guess? But even on maps without blizzard and snow, the game stutters and you need fairly powerful cpu hardware to reach 60hz, even dropping graphics to basically nothing. This is the frustrating part of the game, there's no real reason from a gameplay perspective that a toaster shouldn't be able to run this on low graphics but it's a fundamentally poor experience if you try. My friend using a 2500k + 770 from its launch got a fair chunk of poor performance even on modest settings which did not speak well for somebody who was well above the min requirements.
They prioritized relatively unimportant things in development which made the gameplay experience feel worse. They also were on a tight budget due to THQ going under, and the shipped product really felt that way. I understand why it turned out this way but I'm not impressed regardless.
Other RTT / RTS titles that I find more impressive is stuff like wargame / steel division. Not quite as detailed sure but much larger in scale and unit counts and relatively performative (well some are problematic but it varies). The reason there are no other companies doing highly detailed rts is because rts is almost a dead genre outside of relic and blizzard.
My review:
The single player campaign is insanely easy even on the hardest difficulty and horrible ahistorical and insulting to the Soviet side to the point where it's gross.
The multiplayer is an unbalanced mess to the extreme and you need commander packs to be competitive but it's fun once you get into it. Kinda like the good ol days of CNC.
Bigger fan of Men of War myself but it's an entirely different genre so this is the best you'll get for ww2 RTSs. Coh2 is definitely worth getting when it's free.
The single player campaign is insanely easy even on the hardest difficulty and horrible ahistorical and insulting to the Soviet side to the point where it's gross.
The multiplayer is an unbalanced mess to the extreme and you need commander packs to be competitive but it's fun once you get into it. Kinda like the good ol days of CNC.
Bigger fan of Men of War myself but it's an entirely different genre so this is the best you'll get for ww2 RTSs. Coh2 is definitely worth getting when it's free.
It's great - especially if you care only about single-player. I must admit all the little DLC stuff and weird commander's abilities made it less enjoyable for me in the multiplayer. CoH1 was more straightforward when it comes to special abilities. I wonder if they will go back to simpler model in CoH3... but then again, it would be harder to monetize...