Like seriously. I'm a longtime CoH veteran, putting it as a N1 game in my RTS list and saying that I was hyped about CoH 2 would be an underestimation. I was on the brink of preordering it but I'm a sane person and did not... fortunately. The trailers looked pretty awesome but... Most reviews depict it as a mediocre and even bad game. It has mostly negative reviews on Steam too.

So I don't get it. Some say it's generic (although Relic say they haven't changed the mechanics), others say it's unfinished, third say it's pay-to-win, forth say flamethrowers whatever. Does this really make the game so bad? It's a shame people prefer playing Eastern Front mod for CoH rather than CoH 2. And I really wanna play with the Soviets, for they fought the majority of the war.

What made you hate CoH 2?

Well I can only speak to the campaign stuff, as that is what I mainly play and am interested in.

For me CoH2 fails at several things, lets start with the minor stuff. Cutscenes and voice acting, the English voice actors are mediocre at best and their constant attempts at a fake Russian accent like it's a 90s Hollywood movie are painful in this day and age, especially in videogames that have the luxury of not needing to put an expensive face to a voice and can hire whoever. The Russian localization is if you can believe it even worse, the characters tone is all over the place, it's like all of the stuff was recorded at completely different sessions that nobody bothered to check over, it's a bizzaro world of intonations conflicting with the text and situations.

The more important bit is that for me the game failed in how it depicts the conflict (no not morally) tactically. Sorry for the meme, but they tried to have their cake and eat it too. The small squad tactical focus simply does not work with what events they try to depict and how they try to put the player into them. They go for massive battle scenarios of the war yet all you see on the screen at any one time are just a few squads and vehicles. The sense of scale is instantly shot to shit and all believability goes out the window. Small scale squad focused tactics worked in CoH1 because you were literally small squads behind enemy lines, or street fighting etc. Americans were a minor force and it worked. Secondly because the CoH games focus on small squads the mechanics they implement for Russians to try to make them seem like a massive expendable force all flail limply in the wind, preserving your squads, being conservative, all that feels like a waste of time, when a single shell or flamethrower can wipe off your dudes before you have a chance to even look in their direction. Any defensive position can be erased in a blink of an eye from outside retaliation range. Add to that a bunch of micromanagement mechanics like picking up weapons and freezing/fires, the whole whole thing feels like a hassle and a chore, that is easier to ctrl+A. The gameplay never seems properly epic in scale nor satisfying in that small tactics way these games have delivered before.

At release it was a graphics hog, yet the visuals of the game are nothing to talk about, relying rather on meaningless visual effects to blur the battlefield rather then bring it to life. It's a sad sad day when I looked at a it and preferred the Tiger tank in CoH1.

The action itself just felt more snappy, responsive and intuitive in the original CoH games.

I don't hate it, but it just didn't grab me on any level. I've spent more time and had more fun with the freebie or sale of CoH1 stuff they did to promote the release. Even as someone who has played CoH only just then for the first time.

I liked it. It isn't anything ground breaking or new but they make good improvements and it reminds me a lot of some games I played when I was a kid.

It's bad?

For me it was the performance on my top of the line card being absolutely abysmal, while only looking as good if not worse in some lights as the original company of heroes anyway (which came out like a billion years ago).

Otherwise the campaign seemed pretty meh. I tried the online for a bit and that seemed to be a bit of a focus, it was kind of fun in a World in Conflict kind of way, though I was getting super owned a lot of the time.

So I think the negative reception probably comes more from the fact so many years later it's barely a step up from the original - which was a huge gamechanger when it came out. It's not suprising though given the limited resources of relic now days and all the drama's with THQ. It's probably lucky Sega picked it up and it came out at all.

You've got it all wrong, nobody's saying it's bad, they're saying it's bad. You know, in the Michael Jackson sense.

Well maybe compared to the deserted and neglected RTS scene today, it is a good game. But compared to the original CoH, it's a disaster, at least so I've heard. And I sure as hell don't wanna risk 35€ to find out.

I was joking. :P But yeah, I'm in the same boat: love the first game, very wary about the second.

I've played some multiplayer, it's basically a refined version of the original game. But it hems very, very close to the original, which was inherently a flaw for some people out there. You get a revolution once, I suppose you expect a revolution again!

I'd also say the original never fully recovered from Opposing Fronts in terms of game balance, and suffered from pretty severe swings every patch as they tried to fix it.

This is the first time I've ever seen anyone refer to CoH2 as a disaster; it's less "original", but a lot more polished from a design standpoint. There's still an online community that plays it regularly, and it's not hard to find a match (though, it might be at lower skill levels. Not sure about that one).

Seriously though, I think it's a better game. Visually it's a lot more impressive, and in terms of game design they really got their act together after the Opposing Fronts debacle. But at the end of the day, it's basically Company of Heroes 1.5 only more aggressive and less defensively inclined.

TLDR: game's not bad, seems like a lot of Russians flooded the reviews based on their anger about "revisionist" war history

I haven't played the game, but it shouldn't come as any huge surprise that it wouldn't be good. It was obviously a last, desperate gasp for THQ, pushing Relic to shit out a game in time to maybe save their company. It never stood a chance of working, obviously.

The game mechanics and graphics are just fine, but the story in the campaign was really weird. I didn't connect at all with the main protagonist, nor any of the other general guys you "play as" during some maps. The battles themselves are pretty good, but why would this captain/journalist guy be commanding all these troops? If he's a journalist, is he a guy in the field? If that's the case, then who am I?