14 DAY TRIAL // In the first few missions from the now available Company of Heroes 2 I, the embodiment of Russian high command on the Eastern Front, I performed two actions that I view as heinous and against the very nature of humanity: I gunned down my own troops when they attempted to retreat and I killed surrendering German soldiers.
I also used somewhat borderline tactics like shooting iced lakes to drown enemy units and I burned down fields that the population needed to deny my enemy important resources.
There are other unpalatable moments in the single-player campaign, with the brutality of the Soviet commanders almost equally distributed between their own forces, which are treated like cannon fodder almost always, and the Germans.
Company of Heroes 2 manages to reflect the historical record, which shows that the Eastern Front of World War II was the most bloody of the war for both sides and generates record losses both in men and hardware.
It’s nice to see a video game that chooses to abandon the heroism of the Western Front in order to portray war as it was: brutish, bringing out the worst in men, sanitized after the fact by official reports and glamorized by future historians.
Company of Heroes 2 is also smart because it keeps the cutscenes between single-player missions short and informative, focusing more on the sacrifices of the virtual soldiers you are commanding than on the emotions of the two protagonists.
Strategy titles put the player in charge and in the newest Relic experience, I felt actually bad at times performing certain action, like the above mentioned war crimes.
This happens rarely, but it would be great to see more developers working on war-themed games introducing such disquieting moments in order to question the ideas and the beliefs of the player.