COMPANY of HEROES 2 For PC With Cheats Codes Serial Key
Company of Heroes 2 is a real-time strategy game developed by Relic
Entertainment and published by Sega for the Microsoft Windows platform.
It is the sequel to the critically acclaimed 2006 game Company of
Heroes.
As with the original Company of Heroes, the game is set in World War II
but the focus is on the Eastern Front, with players going primarily on
the side of the Soviet Red Army on various stages of the campaign, from
Operation Barbarossa to the Battle of Berlin. Company of Heroes 2 runs
on Relic Entertainment's proprietary Essence 3.0 game engine, which THQ
claims allowed the developer to bring "new technological advancements"
to the game. In January 2013, Sega acquired Relic Entertainment and
along with it the Company of Heroes intellectual property from THQ. The
game was released on June 25, 2013 in North America and Europe.
It is said that war never changes; war's intensity, its perils, its
world-shifting consequences remain unflinchingly true. Company of Heroes
2 demonstrates this weary axiom by overwhelming your senses with the
heat and light of battle--battle that closely recalls the kind of
skirmishes you once triumphed over in the original Company of Heroes.
This is not a real-time strategy revolution, but a fun revival of
enduring mechanics that pulls you into the trenches of the eastern
front.
There is no shame in retreating so that you may live to fight another day. Unless you are Russian.
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Given the series' penchant for explosive multiplayer confrontations, you
might be inclined to overlook Company of Heroes 2's campaign, though
you would be missing out on some of the game's better moments in doing
so. The narrative is not, however, a return to form for developer Relic
Entertainment, whose Homeworld games brought RTS storytelling to great
heights. Given the excellence of many of the campaign missions, it's
disappointing that the surrounding cutscenes can't meet their levels of
excitement, try as they might. It's best to ignore the decidedly
old-looking cinematics, the cast's uncomfortable accents, and the
cliched attempts at dramatizing a strained soldier-commander
relationship. Instead, let the missions themselves do the talking; the
best ones communicate the hopelessness and despair the cinematics fail
to capture.
Even early missions impress upon you the disposability of your troops,
frequently commanding you to retreat when you are overrun, all while you
order in one nameless conscript squad after another. Interesting new
mechanics, too, effectively communicate the helplessness of an
individual combatant, and not only during the campaign, but in AI
skirmishes, online multiplayer, and elsewhere. On snowy maps, the
fearsome rush of cold and wind don't just make for a chilly sight, but
also make for chilly soldiers. Soldiers feeling the frosty sting need a
warm fire (provided by a resourceful engineer or pioneer) or the
confines of an available structure to avoid succumbing to a frigid
death. Infantry trudge slowly through drifts of snow, and crossing an
icy pond could prove fatal if the weight of a tank--or the eruption of a
grenade--proves too much for the flimsy ice to handle.
A flaming tank is not the kind of warmth a soldier needs to stay alive.
And so you don't confront just the forces of the enemy, but the forces
of nature too, and make important tactical considerations in the
process. Do you risk sending unprotected soldiers to a desolate capture
point, hoping they can make the trek without freezing to death? If it's
later in a skirmish or multiplayer match, you might have half-tracks for
transport purposes, but the possibility of an early lead might make it
worth taking a gamble with a few squads. The weather is not an issue on
every map, but when it's a concern, your usual tactical approach (say,
leading a few squads around the map to capture victory points while
advancing far enough to build heavy tanks) may not work well, if at all.
The campaign excels when making you feel the heartlessness of your
commander's orders. Voice-overs frequently remind you that you are
sending troops out to die for the motherland, and the endless stream of
free conscripts most missions gift you on medium difficulty reinforce
the idea that no one individual is indispensable. Unfortunately, this
huge supply of free infantry makes it too easy to win by steamrolling
across the map using sheer numbers. It's far more satisfying to win a
mission by sending out multiple, carefully constructed control groups
across the map and micromanaging their abilities. (Some infantry can
toss Molotovs, and snipers can fire debilitating rounds, for instance.)
Most campaign missions don't require that kind of high-end strategizing,
however.
Even with the use of free soldiers, campaign missions still manage to be
varied and intense. Some of the intensity comes from the chaos of tanks
lighting up the map and artillery demolishing entire buildings that
then collapse before your very eyes. These are spectacular moments from a
visual perspective in a sharp-looking game, but rarely are such sights
just for show. When a squad hits the ground, pinned by oppressive fire,
it looks authentic, of course, but it also hinders your progress. A
Katyusha's rockets might hit a structure and make a grand fireworks
show, but that structure may be in the way of your actual target,
forcing you to fully destroy it so your rockets can reach their mark--or
to find a better position. Company of Heroes 2 is a one-two punch of
powerful production values and nail-biting confrontations. Just bear in
mind that you can't experience the fireworks if you are still using
Windows XP, because the game doesn't support that operating system. Nor,
for that matter, does it support dual video cards in Crossfire or SLI
configuration.
Armor is vital, but you need infantry to capture victory points.
Company of Heroes 2 excels when it sticks to its standard strategic
formula. In a typical match, you start with a squad of engineers or
pioneers and construct the necessary structures to pump out new units.
You don't send out resource gatherers to collect wood and iron as you
might in a traditional RTS game, but rather move infantry quickly across
the map to capture victory points. At such points, you might build
add-ons that increase your flow of fuel and munitions, which are the
resources, along with manpower, required to create units. It takes a lot
of time for the campaign to introduce its resource-gathering mechanics,
however, so if you're new to the series, don't expect the campaign to
do an entirely great job of getting you prepared to take on human
opposition.
The campaign, however, isn't the only way to get in some offline
practice. As is usual for an RTS game, you can play skirmishes against
the AI, but there's another suite of options called the Theater of War.
The Theater includes a number of cooperative and solo challenges, which
are typically much more challenging than the campaign. While the
campaign is focused on the Russians, the Theater includes both USSR and
German missions, some of which are wildly intense and entertaining.
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