After last year’s award-winning RTS Relic Entertainment has created another time-consuming strategy experience. Company of Heroes 2 is a RTS that follows the conflict between Russia and Germany. Specifically, you follow the experiences of Lieutenant Lev Abramovich Isakovich as he is asked to flashback to the war by an officer of the army.

The Good: So CoH2 is based on the horrific WW2, so to do this right they needed to capture those horrors and make you feel the feelings of sickness when you see hundreds of bodies lying in front of you. You especially feel like you’re there at a moment in the game where you leave your loyal men behind in loyalty to the motherland, obvious regret showing in your character’s eyes, or when your men retreat from consistent heavy machine gun fire only to be shot by their own brothers, their retreat called “A betrayal of the motherland”. It’s these moments that make the battlefield come alive as well as the huge explosions and the screaming and yelling of agony. Bottom line is, if you want an emotional battlefield as well as a chaotic one, CoH2’s campaign should hit the spot.

As well as emotions from the story, the game also has levels where it is literally impossible to win, but they throw you into these situations without telling you that you can’t win, often giving you stress and maybe even anger, but in the end it’s an awesome feature that I hope to see more of in the future.

The multi-player is also quite an experience, especially when you and a friend or 2 (or 3) are on Skype teaming up against some random people that just don’t have your chemistry. You can also play against AI if you want to have a team, but don’t have any friends to do it. Overall, it’s pretty fun to pick up the game and play a little bit of online multi-player to get your fix of some awesome RTS warfare.

The game is presented well in visuals as well as sound. The voice actors seem to overdo their accents at times but other than that, there’re really no problems in this aspect.

The Bad: So CoH2 isn’t perfect. There are some pretty annoying loading screens that seem to last forever as well as some problems in having a successful multi-player game without getting the message “Your video settings are too high and are lagging the game!” The worst part is the fact that if you get this message, you can’t lower you graphics settings unless you go back to the menu.

As well as that, the movement animations are not done very well, with soldiers often seemingly floating for a half a second before each step.

The Ugly: There are a few things that are terribly bad in the game. One thing that really grinded my gears was losing precious time trying to search for one particular squads by panning across the whole battlefield. You see, it is possible to highlight a squad on the battlefield, but I couldn’t find a way to make it take me directly to that squad’s position. This problem even cost me my mission once or twice, which didn’t make me the happiest fellow.

Also, the game doesn’t have a character you really can connect with or fall in love with, which is sad considering the emotional part of the game is done so well. The characters just don’t seem to have any cool personalities or any interesting dialogue, making it hard to actually care about them.

Overall Opinion: Company of Heroes 2 is a well-done sequel to an award winning RTS that does everything good, but seems to do some things only good enough. The graphics are beautiful and go along with gameplay that keeps you on your toes, but the characters take away from your immersion into the story or the emotions it’s trying to trigger. However, the feeling of losing men and just replacing them like cheap toys touch feelings few games touch, making the game an experience past gameplay.