I haven’t played the game, only watched cutscenes on Youtube, but I think this reaction is due to what CoH1 was. I remember cutscenes from original campaign: we came to liberate those lands, our guys die from German machine guns but we press on for the sake of freedom and justice. No mentioning of Dresden bombings, no civilians were harmed, only spirit of brotherhood and honor.

In CoH2 cutscenes I see Russian soldiers that don’t want to defend their homeland and fight back unless Soviet machine guns shoot them in the back. As I understood, all civilian casualties were inflicted by retreating Red Army (I don’t quite understand why would you burn your own villages with people in their houses and then kill your own soldiers). Quotes from mission briefings are from Russian generals that don’t understand why are they fighting… in WW1 in Romania. And, of course, quote from Guderian “I screwed it only because winter suddenly happened and Russians sent billions of meatshields on us”. Maybe it’s all accompanied by cutscenes of Russian heroism and YouTube hides it from me, but ending sequence disappoints the most: we’ve captured Reichstag for a photo, all of this was for the sake of some photo.

I’d understood if that would be German campaign: you’re officer that doesn’t quite understands why would you invade some country, kill 13 millions of civilians and lose your soldiers to winter and pointless fights. Russians behave just like they’re invaders, obviously Jewish hero (Lav Abramovich is anecdotal name from Russian jokes about Jews) isn’t reminded that he fights for survival of his country and he personally would end up in Auschwitz if Germans win.

Also it’s obvious they didn’t do much research. Every mentioned name sounds Russian, but very funny Russian, almost anecdotal – Isakovich, Churkin etc. They could at least open Wikipedia and get some Russians from there.

In any case, I’m ashamed of Russian gamers’ reaction too. Argh.

Not that the plot or the game mechanics were that good. The 3D tactics, as mentioned elsewhere here, was not as cool in practice as it looked. But nobody else was doing it!

It just hit all the right buttons for atmosphere and potential for strategy space games. Sadly, the genre hasn’t progressed much, if any, from there.

I’m thinking of movies like “The Longest Day,” which — aside from all the cheesy cameos from big stars — had many scenes that remind me of what we see in CoH and the WW2 CoD games. Saving Private Ryan was basically just the souped-up version of The Longest Day with better effects and better acting.

I understand Western audience would like to play as someone more European than barbaric commies, hence come the Polish. But they at least could make something like Winter War were it’s more plausible to make USSR evil. They could show German commanders’ decision to kill civilians to fight partisan movement, Soviets mobilizing everything to fight much more advanced enemy… Ah, Hollywood, you make everything worse.

Also, the partisan mission is just one mission where you’re given a bunch of sniper units and the laughable instruction to stay stealthy. Also they’re Polish. Also *SPOILER* they get executed at the end because in this game the Soviet Union is evil, while the Germans are presented in a very neutral way. For a game about the Eastern front this is, quite frankly, an incredibly ridiculous and shallow reading of what actually happened.

*Actually we do. It was called Close Combat, and it was awesome.