[E3 2012] Company Of Heroes II

[Psykoboy2]

Like some or most of you, I have a ton of Steam games I’ve bought during sales over the summer and winter as well as the midweek and weekends (plus the damn dailies have been eating into my wallet now as well). This leaves me with a gigantic library of games I’ve owned but never played, much less installed. Company Of Heroes and its expansions are among those titles.

I had to tell this to the folks who were showing me Company Of Heroes II, when they asked me if I’d played the first game. I’m glad they asked, honestly, because they may have gone over some aspect that was well known in the series that I’d have been completely ignorant on. Even still, I’ll give you the run down on what I was able to see with CoH II.

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For starters, you’re getting a brand new engine – the Essence 3 engine. This brings a higher fidelity and detail to the game. Snow now has depth and isn’t just a texture anymore. This plays a factor since sticking to the roads allows faster movement at the expense of being easily seen and shot while off the roads will cause you to move much slower but at least you’ll be harder to detect and shoot as well. New flame effects have also been added as shown in the demo of the Rzher Meatgrinder campaign when the flamethrower unit decided to light up an enemy cabin. This cabin would stay on fire eventually burning to the ground and taking any enemies inside with it.

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As sequels go with a new engine and graphical upgrades along with TONS of feedback from the previous game and stats beyond stats of how it was played, you’ll also see an improvement in the AI. It has been completely overhauled based on everything they’ve seen and heard from the first Company Of Heroes. Cover vaulting is also a new addition for the game. Apparently this was not in the first and you had to move your unit around cover in order to keep pushing forward. Well, not anymore. Plus, vehicle abandoning is now in the game. Kill the enemies in a vehicle or somehow drive them to flee it, then the vehicle is free to take or use as cover…or even bait if need be. With these additions comes a new way to view the battlefield. They’re calling it “True Sight”. It’s actually visible as you play. The battlefield is only viewable with what your troops see. While that can be a large radius of gameplay, they aren’t able to see behind trees, or other large objects, meaning enemies could be waiting for you even though everything else looks clear. What can’t be seen is given a bit of a shadow effect, just to let you know that you actually don’t know what’s in that area.

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I’ve got no experience with the first game in the series, but I can tell you this game looked beautiful to me and fans of the series don’t seem to have anything to worry about when Company Of Heroes II releases for the PC (as well as Steam) in early 2013.