Relive the intense Battle of the Bulge in Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault

Above: Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault. On the move.

Image Credit: Sega

What you won’t like

A very difficult campaign

I started playing on the “standard” campaign. But the fighting got very difficult. I emerged from battles with a third of my troop strength gone. And since replacements were pretty expensive, I had to start fighting the next battles at less than full strength. Meanwhile, the Germans were getting stronger. That was because they would retreat from one sector into another, supplementing the troops in that adjacent sector.

I was prepared for the likelihood that the game would get tougher. But I lost an entire company pretty early. So I restarted the campaign. I figured out how to properly allocate my points in-between missions to reinforce the companies, but I was still falling short. After my second stab at the Standard campaign, I found I was fighting battles such as Stavelot and Stoumont over and over. I couldn’t win.

So I swallowed my pride and restarted the campaign on the Easy level. I managed to complete the full campaign that way, but it wasn’t easy. I had to steer more resources toward reinforcing one company over another, and that allowed me to survive.

You can buy a fourth company, the Rangers, to supplement your forces. But you have to really want it, as it costs real money for the upgrade. And you only get to play with three companies anyway. Without the Rangers, it’s pretty hard to beat the game on the “Hard” setting. I played the first easy battle of the campaign on Hard, and it took me three tries to win.

Not dynamic enough

The meta campaign could have been more dynamic. For one thing, the Germans don’t attack. This is a part of the Bulge chronology where the Americans are taking back the offensive. But several of the maps, such as St. Vith, start out with a cinematic film describing a German attack. In fact, St. Vith was one of the last battles I fought, and I was clearly on the offensive and mopping up German resistance. Still, in this battle, the Germans were supposed to be on the attack. That’s the way the battle always plays.

It was smart of the developers to create a non-linear campaign. But they should have also included more branching paths in the game and story so that it would still feel like the battle was completely dynamic.

On top of that, the strategic campaign map doesn’t offer much of a strategic experience. You won’t feel like you’re a General George Patton or Omar Bradley when observing the meta map.

Above: Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault. A big explosion.

Image Credit: Sega

Upgrades and reinforcements are expensive

It costs a lot of money to reinforce your company. But inside the game, it also costs a lot of points to order new squads from your headquarters. Your base keeps on dispatching these replacements during the course of the battle.

But I found there were too many trade-offs. The German squads are very well armed with Panzershrecks, the powerful German version of the bazooka, and MG 42 light-machine guns. The American squads start out with rifles. You have to arm them properly with bazookas or Browning Automatic Rifles to give them a chance against the German squads. That takes up a lot of resources and time. In fact, it takes up so much that I never had the opportunity to upgrade to the fun stuff, such as tank destroyers or Stuart tanks.

All of that was completely realistic. Tanks are scarce resources. But fighting with nothing but infantry isn’t as fun.

Relatively weak story

To bring the drama of the battle home, Relic’s developers added three different officer characters who narrate the course of the battle. Kurt Derby leads the support company. Johnny Vastano leads the airborne company, and Bill Edwards leads the mechanized division.

As noted below, the after-mission debriefings from these soldiers gives you a sense of the GI’s experience in the war, but they also miss some of the most memorable moments of the battle.

On top of that, these characters aren’t actually in the battles. And their narrated stories don’t really change dynamically as the course of the battle shifts. These changes would have made the story a little more complex, but they would have been worth it, in my view. As it is, the stories of the three soldiers — as told in their debriefings or letters home — seem bolted onto the game. This is the kind of subject matter that produced wonderful movies such as Saving Private Ryan. But the Hollywood script writers aren’t visible here.

Some historical inaccuracies — or absences

Every now and then, it was strange to see some historical oddities. The airborne company has a standard option to call in a fighter airplane or a rocket-firing plane for air support. But during much of the Bulge, the weather was too bad, and the American planes were grounded. It seemed that the air attacks were so powerful and fun that they had to be included.

In another mission, the German Luftwaffe strafes the American companies, adding some difficulty to the game. But the Luftwaffe was so devastated at this point in the war that it could barely mount any kind of attack. Most of its attacks happened at night. You come away with the wrong impression about the role of air power in the battle. You can also land paratroopers by making requests during the middle of a battle. That, of course, is absurd. American air power played a role at the end, but in this game, you have access to air power most of the time.

There were also some very dramatic moments in the historical battle that don’t come up during the cut scenes, videos, or battles. German colonel Otto Skorzeny led a group of commandos behind American lines, causing havoc by turning road signs in the wrong direction. The German SS soldiers also executed 86 GIs near Malmedy, and when word about this massacre spread, it stiffened the American resolve not to surrender. You also never hear the famous reply by the beleaguered men of Bastogne, where U.S. soldiers were surrounded. Asked to surrender by the Germans, the American commander Anthony McAuliffe replied, “Nuts!” (Translated from slang, it meant, “Go to hell.”).

None of these moments are acknowledged or mentioned. I think they would have made the game more dramatic. And that’s one of the game’s weaknesses. Instead, the narratives of the three soldiers from the different companies are relatively unexciting.