Company of Heroes 2 - Ardennes Assault

Epic Sauce

Just terrible.

No story following any characters with it just being skirmish missions with dumb rules with terrible balancing where again you are severely handicapped as a half assed excuse for the game to deem the it a challenge. Either impose the same dumb rules on the enemy so its fair or don't try at all Relic.

The AI is absolutely unfair. I started the campaign like 20 times over the last years and stopped playing after a few missions, for multiple reasons, often because I was just bored. But today I installed it again. I know how to play and I know how to use my units.

The first 2 missions are quite easy, but the third one with the paratroopers is absolutely insanity. You fight against the germans over 3 main points. There are multiple minor points that give you resource bonuses. At the beginning you barely have any resources and as the game progresses you dont really get much more. Just after 2-3 minutes you notice the germans already have like 4 divisions, each with rocket launchers. You think "Alright, maybe they just saved up a lot, somehow", while you yourself barely have resources to buy the rocket launcher upgrade in the HQ. By the time you can afford just a bit more than just simple infantry, the enemy already has Kübelwagen with MG's mounted on it and some Puma light tanks that you cant do anything about. After getting annihilated you can finally afford to equip 2 infantry divisions with rocket launchers to fight these pesky puma's. You put these divisions in a building so they can fire at them, but you will get a surprise in response: 380mm artillery to the face that instantly kills your whole division. You send in more men to attack the points, but you cant do anything because one of the 30 pumas, 20mm AA vehicles or kübelwagen will just completely wipe your infantry on the spot. When you can finally afford a sherman, it will just get annihilated by the PAK pumas, or by one of the 500 infantry that carries panzerschreck's.
The AI simply got waaaay too many resources to spend on units, which isnt really fair when the map and resource points are basically mirrored.

And all that experience is set on "Easy", by the way.

Extremely boring expansion compared to the excellent russian campaign, only buy this if you love coh2 and wanna complete it. If you are expecting the russian campaign then you will be dissapointed. Its stock as hell, map conquering grind where you just throw guys at stuff, or get snuck up on by fast and irritating stipulation losses. Replay again to do it right, because time slog of course. The russian campaign was amazing, was expecting more when I bought this.

Greetings! Today I’ll be in the trenches with Ardennes Assault DLC for Company of Heroes 2. COH series is probably one of my favorite RTS out there and maybe one of my top of all games. I’ve always loved COH2 so I was hoping this expansion would be an easy victory, did it survive contact with the enemy? Let’s Discuss!

Rangers Lead the Way: I do enjoy the map grid style of the campaign and the unique missions and modifiers are good. The game has an interesting way to represent fleeing forces to reinforce other missions and the leveling system is easy but enjoyable. The company strength thing needs a bit refining though as it seems fairly inconsistent the way it measures losses. Otherwise, just more of the same. The biggest thing this needed was more content, sure 18 missions were a lot, but a lot just felt like skirmishes with modifiers, not a bad thing, but more please.

Rangers are MIA Sir: No mid-mission saves….really? This was done intentionally and despite what the intent might have been this is not a rogue-lite game. This was incredibly frustrating and overly punishing especially with the way the company strength mechanic is. As you lose units you lose company strength, run out and you can’t reinforce or create new units, add to that if you finish the game you now have 1 out of 100 company strength and due to the way the campaign is set that might mean not using that company the rest of the campaign. At least the final level doesn’t really use that.

Nesting DLC Dolls: I want to briefly mention the monetization, for this stand alone DLC, you get everything for the listed price, but you can’t play the faction in ‘multiplayer’ and don’t be fooled, that’s against the AI too. All you get is this campaign, want to play skirmish for this faction, a different DLC. Oh and there is a new, and very powerful, sub-faction for the Rangers, easily the most powerful of the 4 and it’s another DLC…which again, isn’t multiplayer, it’s just for the campaign. It’s not enough that each and every bit is a new DLC, it’s also incredibly difficult to parse out what is what. The game is over 10 years old, has almost a hundred different DLCs and still doesn’t have a ‘complete edition’.

Overall, if you like COH2 you’ll probably want this. For $20 you get a decent campaign, with a new faction, except you don’t. This one is tough for me, I’d probably wait for a sale, as I did. I want to recommend it for the great campaign, but just wish there was more. Overall, I’ll lean on the side of recommending while hoping for a sale. Enjoy!

Mediocre all around. Storytelling in RTS games have never been super amazing or anything, but I miss the cutscenes from CoH 1 where the soldiers would have a bit of banter with each other before or after a mission. None of that is present here. Voice acting and writing is kinda meh. Generic skirmish games instead of unique missions is kinda lame as well. The Rangers DLC within this DLC is just a blatant cash grab. Just play the CoH 1 campaign if you want a really fun and epic campaign from the perspective of the Americans.

The devs were dumb enough to have the single player campaign here share unit balance with multiplayer, which means that all the years of balance patches they made for multiplayer completely broke the campaign balance, to the point that its an absolute slog and not fun in any way. Don't buy, just get the USF multiplayer army instead

it was good on launch but now its just an unenjoyable bug fest because of all the patches that came later. example of a bug is the invincible enemy tanks which are near game breaking. only did this campaign again to unlock stuff for multiplayer. 0/10

I came to have an engaging single-player campaign, not to have my balls put in a vice
if i wanted permadeath mode, i would have asked for it
get bent>:(

The mechanics of this add-on are terrible. While the concept is promising, a game should remain balanced. You can spend tens or even hundreds of hours on this campaign, only to lose everything because of a single misstep. Most games address this by allowing multiple saves so you can recover from mistakes. But no—SEGA decided to take us back to the days when losing meant starting from scratch. That might have worked in the '80s, when games took just a few hours to complete, but it's definitely not okay when hundreds of hours are at stake.

It feels like the whole purpose behind this was to get players hooked, only to monetize later with microtransactions. Ironically, they didn’t even implement that.

Sure, it was only $5, but this is the first time in my life I feel inclined to ask for a refund due to such poor design.

It’s a shame, because honestly, the idea had so much potential, and *Company of Heroes* is a fantastic game overall.

This is probably one of the best DLCs ever made for Company Of Heroes 2. It adds an additional single-player campaign which is focused on western front. But instead of copying original Company of Heroes it delivers us a new experience which is the Ardennes Battle or the Battle of the Bulge of whatever you want to call it. Historically it was a German offensive but Germans failed in it and it resulted in Allied forces getting to Germany itself. And so, in this DLC you play as Americans and your goal it to crush German forces in Ardennes and reach German border basically launching invasion of German mainland. The DLC offers a gameplay in real-time battles and also some strategic mode where you move your forces on a map. Strategic part is too basic but it's still a nice addition anyway. So, overall this is a very solid DLC and you are planning to play single-player content of Company of Heroes 2, this DLC is absolutely a must.

Most social gamers prefer a simpler games.
The Ardennes assault is good but with no saving option is problematic.
You have to restart everything again if you failed in one of the mission.
I been trying over and over. No point. Waste of time.

OK, I bought this a while back but I'm getting back into the game now so I'm going to lay this out for you. This is major bullshit - honestly, this is the kind of shit that should have laws against it.

PART 1: The Campaign

This DLC features a campaign where you manage the U.S. Forces in Belgium. It grants access to the Ardennes Assault singleplayer campaign, and use of the U.S. units within. However, upon starting the campaign, it immediately gives you the illusion of choosing 3 out of four differing companies. The 4th one leads you to a store page where you need to buy a seperate DLC just to have access to these unique units.

Once in the campaign, it's a strange dumbed-down Civ-like strategy interface that actually is just a moderately linear metagame that manages your 3 companies. While the gameplay within is quite good, but repetitive (Chasing crippled tanks and supplies) each match relies on the metagame to track your companies strength and morale. They use these resources to power your units. The game is actually pretty difficult for someone who has no knowledge of the American units (since you just started, and no, it's not really that much like COH1.) and very unforgiving. So pretty much every run ends up softlocking you out of continuing as your company runs low on strength and can't do anything.

PART 2: The U.S Forces in multiplayer

Of course, since you bought the U.S. FORCES campaign for Company of Heroes 2, it grants you access to the armies in multiplayer or even singleplayer matches against A.I, right? You use the units in the campaign, so it's a given, right? WRONG. You have to buy all that shit SEPARATELY because FUCK YOU. So, here I am, stuck with a SHITTY campaign, and nothing to show for it. How about that? Honestly, I don't know if you can refund DLCs, but at this point I'd pay them again to get this bullshit out of my face.

At least the Russians are fun to play...