In the form of a “stand alone” addition, without requiring the main title, “The British Forces” offers us, as its name suggests, to add the British army to the already enormous possibilities that the Company of Heroes 2 has accumulated. For € 12.99 (Steam), in addition to this new army we have to add all the multiplayer maps released to date, including eight new ones that accompany this DLC.
Having all the maps and the independent extension condition, make this launching something more than a DLC, becoming an excellent gateway to those who have not yet enjoyed what is undoubtedly the best multiplayer RTS option.
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The British expansion follows exactly the same policy that Relic adopted with the American and German Oberkommando armies; independent armies whose only use goes through the multiplayer, without “campaign” mode or any alternative for a single player that
is not competing against the PC. For those who like this game mode, the campaign, the alternatives are still the main title Company of Heroes 2, and its expansion exclusively “single player” focused on the “Assault on the Ardennes”.
Once this extension is located in the already vast CoH universe, we now specify what exactly this army includes us. If we limit it to figures, what we get are fifteen new units, six commanders and eight multiplayer maps. However, these figures do not measure
the impact that a new army has on the more active RTS community since the launch of CoH2 in 2013. What these fifteen units and their commanders provide is a different game mechanics that further enrich the almost infinite strategies that offers this title in multiplayer games.
As we saw in the first Company of Heroes of 2006, Relic has a very clear interpretation of what the British army was in World War II; an army eminently defensive, resistant, very difficult to break. History undoubtedly presents it to us as the only
force that sustained the western front once the Germans made the continent’s allies flee from Dunkirk in 1940. Up to that time the British had lost about 70,000 men and kept the most that founded the feeling that in Dunkirk the Germans had spared the lives of another
200,000, with which they muttered the option of surrendering to a German army that seemed unstoppable. It was at that moment that the figure of Churchill, hero of the First World War, shines again, and his stubbornness in the face of surrender definitely positions the British at his side.
Churchill achieves this by appealing to the pride of this town, to its “phlegm” with speeches like the historical one of “we will defend our island at all costs …
we will fight on the beaches … we will fight on the airstrips … we will fight in the fields and the streets … we will fight in the hills … we will never surrender “, a speech that precisely serves to start this” The British Forces “.
That spirit is what gives body to this army in CoH2. No doubt it is the alternative whose advantages begin to shine later in the multiplayer duel. It is at the other end of what represents the German Oberkommando, one of the favorite of the community, since it has its greatest advantages at the earliest of the game, faithfully representing the “blitzkrieg”, “Blitzkrieg”,
which allowed to the Germans to devastate all Europe in record time. Faced with this strategy of rapid and direct attack, also widely used by supporters of the United States Army, the British base all their chances of success in sustaining these onslaughts of beginning of departure and do so by force of fortify themselves, create static defenses, Abuse the artillery …
and hold on until your technological tree can develop units and strategies that allow them to start gaining ground. Although initially the British look
helpless, with infamous infantry units and an almost ridiculous armored power, at the end of the game it will be simply impossible to finish them, since once they fortify a position, it will be very costly to recover it, so that their Advance is slow, but irreversible.
To achieve success, as we have said, it has fifteen units. The basic units of infantry, which can be reinforced with Bren light machine guns and PIAT
grenade launchers, have the main quality of being able to build barbed wire and trenches to ambush them. It is the basis of success in the early stages of the game, when the enemy does not yet have armored forces. If we add to this the possibility of healing themselves when they are not in combat, we will understand the defensive challenge they pose.
In addition to them we will have engineers with the basic function of repairing, mining, detecting mines, which are also effective as assault infantry
thanks to their submachine guns. But undoubtedly the greatest use that we can give engineers is to build mortar sites, anti-armor artillery and anti-air guns. In addition, they can build advanced posts very quickly in which to recover units and where they will flee when they are overcome.
