Quick Look: Company of Heroes 2

There's no motorbikes in this game, right?

Ace

Preorder DLC.

There were a lot of famous female snipers in the russian military.

Brad isn't really doing the game a favor.

Man, this game looks great but Brad playing it really does turn it in to a directionless bore. It's such a shame, Brad is my favorite person on the site but he seems to have a really hard time paying attention to games when he's on camera/recording.

Wheres the howitzer??? Giant red arrow....

who equips the flamethrowers??? "equip engineers with flamethrowers" ....

mmm i guess i cant blame him cuz multitasking is hard

@vinny yes, there were Russian female soldiers during world war 2, altrough they were mostly pilots and snipers, and considerably rare.

What do you want?

Game looks great. Something tells me that Starcraft tactics aren't exactly compatible though :P

lol brad trying to play this like starcraft!

This game suffers from a severe lack of motorbikes.

@brad Double tapping backspace returns to camera to it's original position, if I remember correctly

Oh Jesus. Brad on this game is going to be painful. D:

Heh, Brad's really out of it. Somehow I don't think he's gotten enough into this sort of RTS to make a real comparison to SC2 style games.

I guess playing a tactical game and paying attention to objectives can be hard while talking history.

Also, this game is really good (in case that didn't come out through the Quick Look).

Actually, there were a LOT of female soldiers fighting for the Red Army. 100,000s of them. They were often under-equipped in contrast to the men and they usually had a much higher casualty rate as a result. They were also treated very poorly by their commanders who tended to view them as "campaign wives", regardless of whether or not the women wanted to be a "wife" to a higher-up.

Some female soldiers were treated with respect and treated well - female snipers, female fighter pilots and medics were treated relatively well, but the average female infantry soldier was treated rather poorly.

Yes, the Soviet was kinda ahead when it came to gender equality, though I'm not sure if any where in the infantry, I do know they where in the Air Force. One group was referred to as the "Nachthexen" (NIght Witches) by the Germans, because of their deadly air raids.

God damn it Brad. Operation Barbarossa was the biggest military operation in history with over 4.000.000 German soldiers attacking Russia. Some of the biggest battles in history were fought on the eastern front, most notably the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk. The Germans attacked Russia suddenly, thus violating the non-aggression pact. Stalin was in shock for weeks and was unwilling to accept the fact that Hitler attacked. Perhaps the only correct thing you said was the purges Stalin committed in 1938-39 in which many Red Army officers were killed.

The winter? It certainly was a big factor but to say that it killed more Germans than soviet troops is ignorant. The soviets held Stalingrad without the winter, and the harshest part of the winter occurred when the soviets were getting ready to surround Von Paulus's sixth army. It was when the sixth army was encircled that they suffered (most) deaths due to hypothermia. The German army was ill equipped for the WINTER because they planned to Blitzkrieg the Soviet Union. Not foreseeing the winter and not counting on the fierce resistance the Soviet Army would display when the Germans arrived at Stalingrad. But the German army was otherwise very well equipped and the most elite German units were being sent to the eastern front through out the war.

The victory at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war, but what decided the war was the Battle of Kursk, it was fought July - August.

And I love how you westerners see the Russian victory on the eastern front as General Winter. Lets forget the fact that the nazis suffered 80% of their casualties at Russian hands. You Americans entered the war in 1944, by that time Russians took care of most of the German army.

In conclusion it's extremely ignorant to say that the war in the east was won by the winter and it's offensive to the memory of all the men and women that gave their lives in defense of the Motherland.

/rant

And don't blame me, Brad opened the can of worms. Although I still love you Brad <3

Company of Heroes sounds like some kind of DC superhero MMO.

The fact that Company of Heroes doesn't play like Starcraft and other traditional RTS games is probably my favourite thing about the series.

Good effort by Brad, he clearly finds the subject matter and game interesting, but this isn't Starcraft.

I'm just glad this game got a quick look!

Brad...

While I have zero interest in CoH this game sure looks good and makes me excited to see how Dawn of War 3 turns out.

Makes me want to play some Dawn of War II.

@thedudeofgaming: considering what the men and women of the motherland did to the eastern front after the war I don't think respect is an appropriate emotion that should be conveyed towards Soviet forces.

Despite Brad's complete lack of self-discipline and seemingly little enthusiasm doing the driving, this game still looks incredible. I've got to see some higher lvl gameplay.

Yeah, it's crazy what Hollywood did for todays memory of WWII. While the US entering the war in Europe certainly shortened it in the end and their industrial support before 1944 was very important, too, the perception of it today is ridiculous.

It's one reason why I'm excited for CoH2, the Eastern Front doesn't get enough exposure, especially in RTS. I only remember Panzer General and that isn't even legal here.

Loved the first game and really enjoying this one too. It's been a long time coming!

Great game. Not exactly the game you play for the first time in a quick look maybe. He needs to use cover more. I probably played exactly the same when I picked it up in the beta.

Brad's wiki page

8th grade social studies: with Bradley Shoemaker

@thedudeofgaming: Though as someone from Poland I gotta chime in that the Soviets were almost as bad as the Nazis themselves. :P They basically just switched sides when Hitler fucked them over.

@raiz265: Brad could even make Quake 3 look boring as hell.

...I didn't say it was just the winter that did them in, but okay!

Stalin and communism are one thing, and the Soviet army is another. If you're referring to the killing of German POW, they had it coming.

If you're referring to the Eastern Bloc the US and UK governments are also responsible by allowing Stalin to basically annex those countries. See the Yalta conference for more information.

Oh and tell me how the US involvement in the middle east is any better.

Yeah, I know you didn't. I guess it was a bit of an overreaction on my part, seeing how I tend to bump into a lot of comments along the lines of "General Winter won the war". If I remember correctly you did mention the soviet losses later on in the video, but you have to be pretty careful with the choice of words when discussing history otherwise you get a fuckhead like me that writes an essay in the comment section.

@paulunga: Yeah. Well everyone looks after themselves, the truly fucked up part is how the Soviets turned on Poland during the uprising against the Germans. That was just a completely dick move.

This is where the Quick Look kind of breaks down for me. I do enjoy watching the guys play, but for games that have any kind of a learning curve it's just a video of a lot of fumbling.

Oh fuck here we go

That goes for all of them though :)

I watched like 20 minutes of this at Rezzed last weekend and it looks cool. Still never played CoH original despite owning it. Got to break it out at some point.

You could hide behind horse carcases in Call of Duty original.

Oh man Brad is so misinformed about so much stuff in this game! I hope he keeps playing it a bit more especially on multiplayer. It's not a slow-paced, turtling type of game at all. Check out some high level games on YouTube or Twitch or whatever. I'm sure he'd dig it loads more if he just gave the game a chance.

Winter Maps? Sounds like a good place for a Winter Soldier.

Brad: "Paying attention to everything but the game."

It was an interesting talk, but yeah...

Talking about a game to a person while playing it isn't really that difficult. I don't understand how he could've missed big red arrows all over the place and the objectives in the top left while talking a little bit with Vinny. There's quite a bit to micromanage but it shouldn't be too much for Brad to handle, especially with his SC2 experience.

They aren't taking the human element out of war, they are taking the human element out of half of war. Drones won't be bombing drones, they will be bombing people.

@brad: There's a great podcast called 'hardcore history'. You might wanna check it out, they did a 3 part series titled ghosts of the ostfront focusing on the eastern front. They also did a multi part series on the punic wars, super interesting.

@bishop113: Also, the night witches.

@thedudeofgaming said:

West front, best front.

(I don't have a serious opinion either way, you just set me up for that.)

Uh oh, the Starcraft player is headlining the game.

This is a gentlemen's RTS, none of those alien tactics are gonna work here.

But this should make for a good fumbling quick look.....

EDIT: Indeed it did! Looks gorgeous and will be picking it up when I can.

Well, that was frustrating.

Vinny really should have been the one driving this Quick Look. He sounded genuinely more interested with what this game has to offer. Judging by his comments, he arguably has more experience with the Relic-brand of RTS games and their style of gameplay.

Brad had trouble staying on topic due to his rambling and seemed to have very little preparation or interest. As a fan of Relic's work, I'll be picking this up anyway but I don't feel this Quick Look did much to inform new players about the game itself.

I sincerely hope if Brad is reviewing this game, he is able to do so on its own merits without comparisons to Starcraft or DOTA.

Holy shiit this is kind of painful to watch. Brad is not a big fan of the concept of cover..

How hard is it to read mission objectives that are always on screen, top left?

And then they complain why some games have overwhelming HUDs.

Maybe pay attention to the game