Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts is a standalone expansion to the original Company of Heroes, which means you do not need the base game to run it. Released in 2007, it adds two fully playable factions with their own single-player campaigns: the British 2nd Army fighting through the liberation of Caen, France, and the German Panzer Elite holding the line against overwhelming Allied pressure. Both campaigns are substantial, and both factions play so differently that finishing one tells you almost nothing about how to approach the other. The British 2nd Army is built around firebase tactics. You establish forward artillery positions, lock down territory with defensive emplacements, and use the Royal Engineers to repair and entrench faster than almost any other faction in the game. The key mechanic is the 25-pounder artillery gun, which you can call into off-map barrages or deploy on the field directly. Learning to pre-position cover before your infantry advances is the difference between holding a sector and watching your squads dissolve. The Panzer Elite, by contrast, are a mechanised raider faction. They lack conventional build queues for infantry, instead calling in units from off-map. Their halftrack-mounted grenadiers and tank hunter teams reward aggressive flanking and punish turtling hard. Two factions, two completely separate decision trees. For newcomers to real-time strategy, the entry bar here is honest but fair. The tutorial is minimal by modern standards, but the game's cover system is visual and readable enough that the core loop clicks within a mission or two. You point squads toward yellow or green cover indicators, you keep tanks angled away from AT guns, you cap resource points to fuel your production chain. None of that is opaque. Where Opposing Fronts demands respect is in its mid-game tempo. The AI applies pressure at a pace that punishes idle micromanagement and rewards players who think one engagement ahead rather than reacting to the current one. On higher difficulties, the AI cheats less than you might expect and instead coordinates combined arms pushes that feel genuinely threatening. The multiplayer component still has a community around it through the official servers and community patches. The 1v1 meta is compact enough that you can actually learn it. Doctrine choices, which unlock specialised units and abilities as you accumulate command points during a match, create readable build paths without ballooning into the kind of complexity that requires a wiki open on a second monitor. That said, the balance between Opposing Fronts factions and the original CoH factions when playing the combined roster is not perfect, and it never really was. The Panzer Elite in particular has some situational weaknesses that experienced opponents will exploit ruthlessly. Mod support exists and is active through community hubs, with the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) and various unit and balance patches extending the game's life considerably. If you plan to sink serious hours in, the modded experience is worth exploring after you have a handle on the vanilla factions. The graphics, predictably dated at this point, still communicate tactical information cleanly. Unit veterancy, weapon team setups, suppression animations, all of it reads well at a glance, which is more than a lot of current RTS titles can claim. Bottom line: if you want a WW2 RTS that treats tactical positioning as a genuine system rather than a cosmetic layer, Opposing Fronts delivers that at a price that reflects its age. The British and Panzer Elite campaigns are different enough to justify separate playthroughs, and the multiplayer has more staying power than its player count might suggest at first glance. Diego, Scout Team