Don't let my hours fool you, years ago, I put a solid 800 hours into this game in internet cafes at one time. Ultimately, it remains the absolute gold standard of WW2 RTS games. After some brief, recent adventures with the Call to Arms series, I was reminded just how much I hate the super-realistic, punishing and often, extremely poorly coded and lifeless milsim RTS genre. Relic Entertainment, meanwhile, are experts at making an RTS game fun, retaining style, as well as clear visual fidelity and a decent amount of realism and thoughtful research in design.
The music at times is a bit too bombastic and cinematic, feeling less like the desperate defense of the Soviet Union against tyrannical German offensive in Operation Barbarossa or the coordinated, but difficult tactical countering American forces applied to the German offense in Ardennes, and more like you are a stormtrooper hunting down ewoks. Surely, the ghost of Warhammer 40k Dawn of War still lingers and it is not necessarily a bad thing.
In many ways, the game's mechanics have aged poorly compared to Dawn of War 1 and 2. Company of Heroes 2 is utterly punishing and has terrible pacing in all of its missions. In many ways, it is also overly reliant on filler missions that consume a great amount of time. Call to Arms is also guilty of this, missions that are sure, realistic in long defense missions, but the lack of momentum and the rendering of static defense tactics is not necessarily fun.
It should be mention that this game is not without controversy overall. The initial Eastern European campaign briefly got the game banned in Russia and honestly, it is rather surprising as to why. This was around the time when a lot of western games had fairly liberal takes on the Eastern Front, Call of Duty's World at War being the most predominately influential one. A very nuanced take on the "other Allies" was of course, entirely framed by a Cold War education.
However, I do not think the game is purely revisionist with any intent to portray the Soviet leadership, let alone its reviled officer class prior to '43, in a way that is perpetuating any sort of political agenda. Rather, its a rather typical liberal take, based entirely on the very liberal-approved documentation of the war from Western sources. At the time, most of the literature and debate on the subject was largely misinformed due to the fact that Russia and the Soviet world as a whole, have a sort of super-infraculture that few outsiders can ever hope to understand. In fact, life-long western Soviet observers were completely baffled by the dissolution of the USSR and were utterly sure that the USSR would be triumphant in the Cold War. The hard fact is that the Iron Curtain was actually more of a one-way mirror and only one side could not tell which one was a reflection.
Company of Heroes 2 is less a political agenda and more of wanting to tell a story that is entertaining. An inherently reactionary story in terms of entertainment-tropes and its reliance on exaggeration over realistic depiction and with an uncanny linearity around select characters rather than recognizing the factual incidents as not nearly as concentrated and absolute, but ultimately a very liberal, western understanding.
The funny thing is that Americans, Canadians and so on, have the same factually wrong interpretation of the USSR as many Russian do. Both Americans and Russians, erroneously, imagined that Russia could greatly overpower its peers like in the Modern Warfare 2 campaign and that the Eastern Front, truly was a meat grinder of assault waves that was won solely by the absolute grit of the Soviet peasant class and its reliance on old, outdated but reliable weaponry, combined with the absolutism in the ranks coming from Stalin himself.
As a result, you get something very akin to a Garth Ennis comic book, which I adore. I understand subjectively it is written in a very liberal, but edgy way and that any 'agenda' is buried under what is actually engaging and cool for the characters, with dramatic exposition of larger events condensed to single character interactions and consequences... and ultimately, you should just go into it knowing it is closer to the infamous myths of Enemy at the Gate than it is to the raw reality of the true events. All in all, it does perpetual Hollywoodized myths of the war, but the myths themselves have a glimmer of truth, but almost all the sources on it come from disillusioned exiles, pro-German rearmament Nazi sympathizers and NATO warhawks and ultimately, history hobbyists rather than enthusiasts.
The tone between the base game and the Ardennes DLC campaign is significant and perhaps realistic in the regard that a well trained, logistically and mechanically stronger US force was fighting an already mostly defeated German foe with years of extreme war weariness and growing delusion and defeatism dissonantly, compared to the absolute desperate defense of the Soviet forces during the far worse Eastern Front. Regardless, the writing does show more literacy on the subject than the writing itself actually implies. Hiwi collaborators and even a ROA officer show up in visual uniform in cutscenes but not by name, for example.
Ultimately, it is a western game with western audiences in mind and thus, the perspective is not so much jingoistic as much as it is simply biased to the western perspective, which modern scholars have completely dispelled in recent decades. Is it propaganda? No. Is it enjoyable? Personally, even as someone very well versed in the subject, yes. If anything, it gets more things right than wrong and the focus on the Soviet atrocities to their own people is at least engaging from a character standpoint. However, the story at times also completely downplays the Red Partisans and singles far more credence to the more liberal-sympathetic Polish resistance, despite pulling far more from the reality of actual Soviet aligned partisans. That being said, the game does acknowledge the prevalence of female Soviet snipers which is cool to see.
Multiplayer is still the best it ever was and the limited factions was entirely to the benefit of the game, in my opinion. It is certainly more a traditional RTS than a super realistic one, which in turn, means its actually very fun and very enduring to normal, non-masochistic people.
The ewok music is still good, of course.
