Company of Heroes 2: The Western Front Armies Pack (DLC)

Company of Heroes 2: The Western Front Armies is a standalone, multiplayer-only expansion for Relic's WWII real-time strategy game. It adds two factions to the existing CoH2 pool and ships with eight new Western Front maps. No base game required to play it, though owners of the main game can match against you freely. If you walked away from CoH2 because the Eastern Front armies felt too familiar after years of Soviet-vs-Wehrmacht rotations, this is the shot of variety you were waiting for. The two factions are genuinely built around opposite design philosophies, not reskins of what already exists. The US Forces start every match with a fully constructed base, which sounds like a huge early advantage, and it is. The catch is that deploying advanced units requires calling in officers first: a Lieutenant unlocks machine gun teams, a Captain opens anti-tank options. Riflemen can swap weapons at base, paratroopers can flank-grab control points, and the whole faction rewards high macro play, map pressure, and rapid resource capture over careful unit husbandry. The Oberkommando West runs on an entirely different logic. You begin with a single HQ building and a supply truck. That truck must be driven onto captured ground and converted into one of three mobile forward bases, covering support, armor, and defense branches respectively. Sturmpioneers and Volksgrenadiers are expensive but tough, and OKW's late-game heavy armor, up to and including King Tigers, hits harder than anything the Americans field. The trade-off is that replacement costs are punishing, unit preservation is non-negotiable, and your APM needs to be respectable if you want to pilot this faction well. For a strategy head, the depth here is real. Each faction gets three commander slots that radically shift playstyle before a match even begins. US commanders can spec into artillery barrages or air support, while OKW commanders push further into tank doctrines or defensive fortification builds. The eight included maps all support Victory Point and Annihilation modes, and they are well-constructed for competitive 1v1 and 2v2 play. Snow mechanics from the base game are largely absent, which reduces weather micro but also shrinks the total environmental hazard variety. Now, the honest accounting. There is no single-player content here at all, not even Theatre of War co-op missions. Compared to the original CoH's Opposing Fronts expansion, which included two separate campaigns alongside its new factions, Western Front Armies looks lean. Community critics at launch also pointed to initial balance issues, particularly around OKW's manpower-heavy unit costs, and some vehicle redundancy in the German roster. Relic did address balance iteratively post-launch, which counts for something, but this is a DLC that lives or dies on competitive multiplayer. If that is not your use case, there is very little here to spend time with. For the newcomer angle: this pack works as a standalone entry point into CoH2's multiplayer without paying for the full base game. You can queue into automatch against all four existing factions on all available maps. That is a genuinely sensible deal for anyone who has been watching CoH2 from the outside and wants to test the water. The tutorial is functional, and the faction asymmetry makes learning feel rewarding rather than rote. Veteran CoH2 players who already own the original armies will find the value proposition thinner, but the fresh matchup dynamics and new map rotations do extend competitive life meaningfully.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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