Company of Heros 2 has been released; read our Company of Heroes 2 review to find out our verdict.
Company of Heroes 2 looks an awful lot like, well, Company of Heroes – and deliberately so. But there’s a lot ticking away under the hood of this battered Russian jeep that simply wouldn’t have been possible in its six-year-old predecessor. Including that soft, white, procedurally clever snow.
Principle designer Quinn Duffy told PCGamesN: “In that six years there were a number of cases where we looked at the game, at what we were going to do, and we didn’t get to the point where we had the technology we wanted, or the systems to drive the development, to tell the kind of story we wanted to about the Eastern Front.
“We looked at doing an expansion pack, an Eastern Front expansion pack for the original, but we couldn’t do the snow, we couldn’t do the breaking ice, we couldn’t do the cold weather stuff in the original game engine.”
In Company of Heroes 2, snow is something of a big deal. ‘ColdTech’, as Relic refer to it, sees the fluffy white stuff gather and deepen, and retain the footsteps of the soldiers who’ve trodden through it – at least until the path’s covered by fresh snow, or melts away.
Early this summer, Our Dan found out just why Company of Heroes 2 is set in Russia. Those are Relic’s reasons – do you think the Eastern Front will offer enough new tactical scope to push the series forward?