Flame-grilled

Company of Heroes remains one of the most popular RTSes despite being six years old. Therefore, the announcement of Company of Heroes 2 has made a lot of fans very happy.

While the Company of Heroes 2 system requirements are perhaps a little way off, there are clues about the new game emerging that give us some insight as to the kind of rig that will perform well with the game. A couple of nuggets of info about the gameplay are appearing too…

Firstly, We’ve been told that Company of Heroes 2 has full Direct X 11 support, and is being developed on an all-new ‘Essence 3.0’ engine, which supports fancy gewgaws such as SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion). It looks like a top-end machine will see noticeable improvement with the new engine.

As for gameplay, foot troops will be smarter and more versatile on the Eastern Front, where the game takes place. Soldiers can vault cover and don’t end up taking cover on the wrong side, as they have been known to do in the original game. Also, with a bit of planning and luck, they might be able to disable, capture and commandeer enemy armour – a tempting proposition, because the Germans done got those purdy tanks.

But there’s a cost to being the Russians, as any student of World War 2 history will tell you. Commissars will gleefully shoot you in the back if you try to retreat, so hit-and-run tactics are unlikely to work. During the war, the Germans used their tanks to screen Russian troops from their own commanders so they could retreat – will such a complex and morally confusing tactic work in CoH2, we wonder?