Company of Heroes 2 - Ardennes Assault

The persistence is the point, and it delivers. Squads you grind down in one mission show up understrength in the next, the veterans you keep alive become the spine of your late-campaign attacks, and the strategic map quietly logs every unit you threw at a bad plan. Most RTS campaigns hand you a fresh army at every loading screen. This one gives you three understrength US companies in the Ardennes and asks which of them you are prepared to break. Underneath the campaign layer it is the Company of Heroes 2 ruleset, and those rules are still some of the sharpest squad tactics in the genre. Cover comes in tiers and you will learn to read it at a glance, suppression pins infantry in place until somebody flanks, vehicles carry rear armour worth chasing with a cheap unit, and one machine gun with a clean firing arc can hold a road for five minutes on its own. The campaign wraps that in a Battle of the Bulge map cut into territories, each one garrisoned, each one feeding you fuel and munitions income. You choose which company moves where, and every move spends time the German counteroffensive is using better than you are. The three companies run their own battlegroup tech trees but draw from a single shared XP pool, so committing hard to one specialisation means the other two stay generalists for the rest of the run. If you have never touched this series, it is a friendlier entry point than the tag list suggests. There is no build order to memorise in the StarCraft sense. You have a handful of infantry squads, a couple of support weapons, and one honest decision per mission about whether to spend fuel on a light vehicle or bank it. The actual skill curve is terrain reading plus one rule: units cost far more to replace than to preserve. Play on the middle difficulty, retreat squads at half strength instead of squeezing out one more kill, and finish missions with your veterans intact. Do that and the campaign teaches itself over roughly 15 to 20 hours. Crank the difficulty and the same lesson gets expensive quickly, because the higher settings are less about a cleverer opponent and more about how fast the pressure arrives and how little slack you get for a misread flank. Where it disappoints is the strategic layer once you see the seams. Territory decisions matter mostly as income and positioning rather than as genuine branching, and a second run makes the pattern obvious rather than fresh. Several missions share one shape: push to a point, hold it through a timed counterattack, mop up. The skirmish AI applies steady pressure but flanks predictably, and once you learn its tells it will feed squads into the same suppression arc more than once. Difficulty pacing is uneven too, since one mission hands you a defensible ridge and the next drops the same battered roster onto an open crossroads with no signposting about the jump in effort. Workshop support is here, but the mod scene around this game has always aimed at skirmish maps and multiplayer balance rather than the campaign, so do not buy it expecting the second life a Paradox title gets from mods. The wider audience lands at roughly four fifths positive across a very large Steam review count, and that reads correctly to me. This is the best-structured campaign in the Company of Heroes 2 family without being the thing that makes anyone fall in love with the series, and the skirmish and co-op side comes with it, which is still a decent place to practise combined arms without a ladder rank punishing your experiments. Buy it for the attrition system and the tactical layer underneath it. Treat the strategic map as a framing device rather than a grand-strategy engine, budget a long weekend instead of a season, and go in knowing that the campaign is at its best the first time through, when you do not yet know which squads you are about to lose.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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