You've got another opportunity to pick up Company of Heroes 2 for free this weekend. Just head over to Steam, add it to your library, and the base game is yours to keep forever.

Relic Entertainment is holding a franchise-wide sale on Company of Heroes through this weekend. Now through Sunday at 6 pm GMT, you'll be able to grab Company of Heroes 2 for free. Then you'll have until Sunday November 24 to grab any Company of Heroes game or DLC at 75 percent off.

For instance, you might want to pick up Ardennes Assault, an excellent and exciting expansion for Company of Heroes 2 that covers the Battle of the Bulge and landed on our list of Best Depictions of World War 2.

Company of Heroes 2 has been free before, both on Steam and the Humble Store, but if for some reason you've missed it in the past, you have another opportunity now. Just remember to stay warm out there on the Eastern Front.

It’s uncommon these days to see an RTS released that doesn’t have competitive intentions. From larger titles like Halo Wars 2 or Dawn of War III to smaller ones like Empires Apart, a lot of work in real-time strategy games typically goes into the multiplayer experience. However recently, with games like They Are Billions or Frostpunk, we are seeing some leanings back toward a singleplayer focus.

Let's celebrate the qualities of a great singleplayer real-time strategy campaigns by picking out some of the best ever made. In so doing, it’s very difficult to avoid a retread some of the common giants in this space: Relic, Blizzard, and Westwood’s games have all taken world-building and storytelling very seriously and that shows in the quality of their campaigns. Alongside these, I’m going to place some titles that perhaps haven’t gotten quite as much attention before, or that might’ve slipped by unnoticed by some people. 

This isn’t an ordered list; I started out trying to put them in a countdown, but these games are often good for such different reasons it seems silly to rank them. Let’s get cracking. Note, there are a few spoilers for the older games in the list.

Battle Realms

Often when we discuss advanced combat systems in RTS, games like Dawn of War, Men of War, Company of Heroes, or WarCraft 3 come up. Liquid Entertainment’s 2001 RTS Battle Realms deserves a prominent seat at this table. Released about a year before WarCraft 3, Battle Realms features a number of fun systemic twists. You could level up peasants to any combat unit, spend one resource (water) to replenish another (rice), dynamically switch units between ranged and melee combat, and upgrade systems using a novel Yin/Yang system.

The campaign itself isn’t as polished as some of the others in this list: all cutscenes are rendered in-game, which looks pretty dated these days. But the core formula still feels fresh in 2018. Taking the mantle of either the Serpent Clan, or the stalwart Dragons, you must shadow the exiled hero Kenji as he strives to re-establish the dominance of his chosen clan. I put a lot of weight on choice in campaigns, and Battle Realms does a good job of this, giving you choice over the territory and scenario you take on next. Winning battles can provide bonuses in future missions, which adds a note of persistence across missions.

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault tells the story of the Battle of the Bulge through the eyes of four commanders (three of which are playable). Each has their own backstory and personality, which you see reflected in the forces of the three playable leaders. The armies are interesting, but it's the surprising depth and uncompromising difficulty of the Ardennes Assault meta-layer map that really sets it apart. 

One thing I kind of like about several of the RTS on this list is that they don’t try to emulate the political layer of Total War games and instead let battles take front and center. Ardennes Assault does this by using reinforcements to create rewards and consequences. defeated enemies can retreat to reinforce territory you haven’t taken yet, making subsequent missions harder than they otherwise would have been. You can cut off these retreating enemies by maneuvering your companies on the map, but doing so means you might miss out on time-critical missions. There’s a lot of nuance in the system, and honestly this campaign style is one I’d love to see ripped off time and again. 

Mission design is relatively varied, from holding a defensive line to standard Control Point capture, and the finale is memorable without being over-the-top ridiculous like some final missions can be (It’s coming up next, but Battle for Dune could fit here) easily.

Emperor: Battle for Dune

Some titles on this list are here because of the presentation of their story, and how memorable their characters are. Some titles are on this list due to the replayability and depth of their systems. Emperor: Battle for Dune is here because of all of these things.

Westwood adapted the Command & Conquer formula and dressed it in the campiness of the 1984 Dune movie. The campaign gives you a Risk-style territory map where you must battle two AI Houses for control of the planet Arrakis.  

The game throws in story-progression missions every couple of levels to give you a break from the unrelenting desert—some missions take place on Spacing Guild Heighlighers or other planets like Caladan. You can also ally with (or fight) the Minor Houses, which creates some variation across playthroughs. Along with Ardennes Assault, Emperor: Battle for Dune remains the gold standard for an enjoyable meta-campaign. And, along with Red Alert 2, Emperor stands strong as one of the best examples of enjoyable campiness in real-time strategy gaming.

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Dark Crusade introduced two of the most interesting and fun factions in all of RTS gaming: the Necrons and the Tau. These factions are interesting in and of themselves as members of the Warhammer 40,000 lineup, but in the context of RTS, they’re quite a pair.

Other games in this list, like Ardennes Assault and Emperor: Battle for Dune, have meta-layer strategic campaigns, and darn good ones. Dark Crusade’s iteration stands out amongst them for a number of reasons. Territories give you access to unique customizations that can change how you approach the game. Given the start locations of each faction, you can acquire these customizations in different orders. Also, as you progress you’re able to apply wargear to your chosen leader, further customizing them and giving you a fun sense of progression and growth even without much of a story to go on beyond Warhammer-generic Endless War.

There are other nice touches too. The campaign preserves a your base after you have won a province (something I really would like to see happen more in RTS—it feels right to come back to somewhere you’ve already battled and see your progress in that area preserved). The Honor Guard for faction leaders are another neat persistent element.

Homeworld

Relic’s Homeworld remains one of the most compelling real time strategy games ever made. It's rare for a real-time strategy game to create a universe of such scale and poignancy. Karan S’Jet and the Mothership have become iconic characters, and the game has an emotional weight I haven't experienced in another RTS game.

I tend to view campaigns that offer some choice to be superior to linear ones, partially because I value replayability in singleplayer, but also partly because such choices can provide powerful feelings of agency to the player. Homeworld's linear campaign is an exception, however. Your forces carry over from mission to mission, which creates consequences and captures the tone of a fleet scrabbling to survive.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

I was skeptical of Deserts of Kharak. I didn’t think that a game based on Homeworld’s DNA could work properly on the surface of a planet, but it does this surprisingly well, and terrain encourages a lot of play over features like the ridges of dunes. It also has a decent linear campaign that borrows the right elements from the original Homeworld games.

On the default campaign setting you bring units across from mission to mission, and the missions are well paced to allow you a breather after finishing a particularly tough battle. You can turn this off at any time, to swap out a broken force for a pre-set loadout for the mission—This saved me a couple of times later in the campaign when I suffered massive losses at a critical moment. 

Like the core Homeworld games, the game is deeply atmospheric, and there were times when the desert around my little fleet of vehicles felt vast in a way that, for instance, I never felt in a game like Battle for Dune. The tone is sometimes interrupted by vehicles doing awkward dances trying to navigate lumpy deserts, but Blackbird did a phenomenal job of giving the world a sense of scale. Also in the spirit of its predecessors, the cadence of the story ratchets up at just the right times, increasing the stakes and providing twists that elevate the game far above standard RTS fare. 

The Gaalsien and their leader, the K’had Sajuuk, are wonderful villains, almost akin to the Brotherhood of Nod from Command and Conquer. Or perhaps like the fremen from Dune. While the story differs from previous Homeworld canon, the overall quality of Deserts of Kharak’s storytelling make it one of the very best RTS campaigns released in the modern era.

Red Alert 2

I praised Emperor: Battle for Dune for its campiness, and Westwood always did this well. But nowhere did it strike the perfect tone, in unit design and cutscenes, as in Red Alert 2. Like most of Westwood’s campaigns, Red Alert 2 features separate stories for both the Allies and the Soviets—for my money, both are pretty darn good, but the Soviet campaign is more enjoyable overall. You really just play through the pre-defined story with no real choices or branching in the plot, but everything is so over-the-top it’s really hard to mind.

Nuclear Missiles, Psychic Beacons, Yuri’s thousand-yard-stare, Einstein and the Chronosphere, turning the Eiffel Tower into a giant Tesla weapon, the Soviet Premier being apprehended in his underwear—there are so many hilarious moments in the game, accented by suitably ridiculous FMV. Like WarCraft 3, this is linear storytelling done right: original, entertaining, and memorable.  Also, I need to give them props for the detailed environments: Westwood typically does a good job of giving you a sense of place: making cities actually kind of look like, well, cities. It’s all too common in RTS to be fighting in anonymous hinterlands, and Red Alert 2, especially for its time, went a step above.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty

This one might have to come with some caveats. StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, are iconic games in their own right. But from an execution perspective, StarCraft 2 is simply more enjoyable. Blizzard has had a long time to hone its craft, and while the game may not have done proper justice to the story set up in the series’ first installment, there’s no doubt that the actual mission design and entire between-mission interface ranks among the very best the genre has to offer.

Every mission has a twist. In one mission you visit corpse of the Overmind, in another you have to flee from a huge wall wall of fire. Side missions matter, helping you to specialize your units and tech outside of combat, and you have some choice in how to proceed between missions. You can talk to and interact with the cast of characters growing around you, and the cantina even has a phenomenal little arcade game.

There’s a bit of persistence to your choices, though not to the point where (as in Homeworld or Ardennes Assault) it can actively interfere with your ability to complete the game. Unconstrained by the need for multiplayer balance, the campaign lets you upgrade units into powerful variants and customise your overall force. The standalone expansions, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, also offer splendid campaigns that thoroughly explore the Zerg and Protoss factions.

WarCraft 3

WarCraft 3 might be the pinnacle of Blizzard's storytelling. The quaternate storyline of Medivh, Thrall, Arthas, Kel’Thuzad Jaina Proudmoore, Tyrande, Illidan, Mannoroth and the battle against Archimonde is cinematic, epic, and tied together with some of the best cutscenes in the genre (still). Mission design is varied, and each faction is given its time in the sun.

The turning of Arthas is perhaps my favorite moment in all of RTS gaming. Seeing his rising despair and frustration with the limitations of being good, committing genocide at Stratholm, killing plagued villagers, accepting a demonic weapon in order to defeat the Dreadlord Mal’Ganis, killing his father, and then starring again in the Undead campaign: it’s wonderful.

World in Conflict

In the list above, I’ve gushed over story presentation, mission design, choice and flexibility in how to proceed through the game, replay value, and frivolous campiness. I’ve also lauded making the player feel a part of a larger world (something too many RTS are incredibly bad at). This last is where World in Conflict shines.

In this campaign the onus is on you to assist your AI-controlled team, trying to complete their objectives in coordination with the larger war effort. This is reinforced by stunning narration (I could listen to Alec Baldwin read the phone book, to be fair) and a well-written story that ends up being surprisingly powerful.

Technically, I’d consider World in Conflict to be a real-time tactics game rather than an RTS: there’s no real base building or economic progression, and the entire emphasis in the game is on controlling ground and using your units effectively. While some RTTs can feel like an RTS with half of the game stripped out, World in Conflict is prominent among the RTT that stand strong on their own merits. The campaign is a great showcase of WiC's particular take on the genre.

Hey, do you want Company of Heroes 2 for free? Yeah you do. So what you want to do is head over to the Humble Store sometime over the next couple of days, and click the button that says "Free!" 

Now, having dispensed with the technicalities, let's have a look at the game. Company of Heroes 2 is a World War 2 RTS developed by Relic and released in 2013. Despite its age, it still has a substantial following: SteamCharts says it had a peak concurrent player count of more than 9100 today, a little under half its all-time peak of 20,747.   

That's not bad for game that's four years old, but not really surprising either. We cited it last month as one of the best videogame depictions of the Second World War, thanks to the way "it gave each of its distinct companies a beating heart—voiced officers who each represented an archetype of the types of people who got caught up in the war." 

We also gave it a very solid 80/100 score in our review. 

The Humble Store also has all the Company of Heroes 2 DLC on sale too, except for the British Forces for some reason. Your best bet, if you're just getting into all this, is the Company of Heroes 2 Master Collection, which includes the base game and almost all the DLC (Ardennes Assault: Fox Company Rangers isn't included) for $10.   

The Company of Heroes 2 DLC is on sale until December 18, but the COH2 freebie is only good until 12 pm ET on December 16. 

World War II has been the backdrop for hundreds of PC games in the time since the Allies declared victory, but not all of them get it right. Stereotypes or absurd action setpieces leave historians shaking their heads, and at this point we've seen the same famous battled played out so many times. What would it look like to cobble together a game made from the best depictions of those moments, spread across years and genres?

These are our favorite representations of key World War II moments and battles. Like the games of our most historically accurate PC games, not all of them would pass muster at an academic conference. But they're all commendable for capturing some element of the conflict in a way that shows a reverent, compelling attention to detail.

Best D-Day landing - Medal of Honor: Allied Assault 

While Allied Assault’s graphics don’t hold up flawlessly today, it felt grippingly real in 2002. The developers tried to make us feel like we were in Saving Private Ryan, and they knocked it out of the park. I can still hear the final instructions before being dumped into the surf echo in my mind: “Head for cover and get to the shingle! I’ll see you on the beach!”

I was genuinely tense as the ramp to my transport lowered, putting me directly in the line of German machine gun fire. My heart raced as I watched my fellow soldiers drop like flies all around me. Finally reaching safety was pure euphoria. Many games have tried to recreate that feeling since, and none have truly succeeded in such a gut-wrenching fashion.

Best Battle of the Bulge - Call of Duty 1

It’s easy to forget Call of Duty began as a single-player focused World War II shooter that rose to prominence in an era when it was compared favorably by critics and fans to Medal of Honor and Battlefield. The most memorable mission from the original game (and perhaps in the whole series) was the capstone of the American campaign, “Festung Recogne”. It flips the pacing of Normandy on its head. Rather than a sense of dread at the carnage you know is to come, it lulls you into a false calm before the first wave of Germany’s most infamous counter-attack of the war takes you off-guard.

Infinity Ward did an excellent job of making the assault feel unexpected, and the fight to stabilize the situation frantic and challenging. 

Best depiction of junior officers - Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault 

Sticking to the Battle of the Bulge, I couldn’t complete this list without mentioning CoH2’s fantastic Ardennes Assault expansion. In addition to introducing very interesting dynamic campaign elements, it gave each of its distinct companies a beating heart—voiced officers who each represented an archetype of the types of people who got caught up in the war. The reactive end mission dialogue made me feel each victory and defeat ever more keenly. I’ll never forget Johnny Vastano lamenting the pointless loss of life after a mission where I’d played fast and loose with my boys to get the job done.

Best air combat - IL-2 Sturmovik series

There’s a reason IL-2 is still a darling in the flight sim community all these years later. The meticulous modeling, both visually and mechanically, of the storied Soviet aircraft was enough to set it apart on its own. But it also dialed up the immersion by introducing mechanics like blackout and redout when experiencing extreme g-forces. While most flight sims are content to give you the most immersive experience of a robot flying a plane, not many go out of their way to remind you that you’re playing a flesh-and-blood human being.

Add to this some well-designed missions and wonderfully tense dogfights, and it’s hard to recommend any other game about flying a plane over war-torn Europe more highly.

Best strategic layer - Hearts of Iron IV 

Not many World War II games get into how and why the Allies actually won. Unfortunately for the romantic depictions we’re used to, it wasn’t primarily because of the heroic sacrifices of a few gifted servicemen. It actually had a lot more to do with availability of resources and industrial capacity. These concepts underpin Hearts of Iron IV and challenge you to think about aspects of modern total warfare that most normally wouldn’t give a second thought to. Rather than making it across a beach, your objectives often involve securing key oil fields and developing your industrial heartland.

Best depiction of ground combat in the Pacific - Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm 

The Red Orchestra series represents perhaps the best infantry-focused multiplayer shooters centered on the conflict, and Rising Storm in particular shines a light on the oft-overlooked Pacific theater. Like Allied Assault, it does a fantastic job of depicting the pressure of coming under attack from all sides. Battles play out amidst the chaos of mortar fire and shouted warnings. It's all the more impressive that Rising Storm accomplishes this using other players rather than scripted NPCs. The confusion and paranoia of jungle combat is tuned perfectly to create hectic, low-visibility firefights and allow for cunning ambushes.

Best high-level tactical experience - Steel Division: Normandy ‘44

Existing at a scale just above Company of Heroes but below Hearts of Iron, Steel Division excels at giving you a detailed and plausible sense of commanding combined arms resources to win large battles. Scouting and intelligence are emphasized, gaining air superiority can be decisive, and every weapon on every tank or infantryman models realistic range, accuracy, and penetration. It exists in a great sweet spot in terms of scope and scale to give you the total World War II experience (minus naval combat) in a single match.

The Humble Store Spring Sale is in full swing, and all the developers and publishers seem to be getting in on the party. Today, the SEGA Spring Sale begins, and lasts until Friday, May 19. 

In this deal you'll find the likes of Total War: Warhammer, Company of Heroes 2, the Alien: Isolation Collection, and much more for far cheaper than you'd normally find them.

Total War: Warhammer is one of our favorite strategy games of the last few years, and it's down to £20 / $30 in the sale. Check out our review if you want to know more about it.

Company of Heroes 2 is down to £7 / $5 for the rest of the week. It's several years old now, but it's got a fairly lengthy single player campaign and great multiplayer if you can find other people playing.

Alien: Isolation is, according to our review, the game the Alien series has always deserved. Grab it for £3.74 / $10 if you're looking for some horror this week.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

The Humble Company of Heroes Anniversary Bundle doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it's a really good deal for fans of Second World War-based RTSes. For $1, you get Company of Heroes, the Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor expansions, and Company of Heroes 2 The Western Front Armies: Oberkommando West, which offers standalone access to Company of Heroes 2 multiplayer. But this is a Humble Bundle, and that means the real deals lie ahead.

Spend more than the average, which is currently just a little under $7, and you'll also snag Company of Heroes 2, COH2 The Western Front Armies: US Forces, the Case Blue, Southern Fronts, and Victory at Stalingrad mission packs, and the COH2 soundtrack. And for $10, which is really where you want to be on this package, you'll add The British Forces, Ardennes Assault, Ardennes Assault: Fox Company Rangers, a Humble-exclusive skins pack, and the COH digital art book.

(Jack it up to $30 and they'll mail you a COH bundle t-shirt, but that's maybe a bit much if you just want to work on your battlefield prowess.)

Company of Heroes is getting a little long in the tooth but it was good stuff back in the day, and you can't go too wrong when you're getting the whole package for a tenner. The Humble Company of Heroes Anniversary Bundle is live now and runs for two weeks, meaning that the curtain will fall on October 18.

British people, of a weekend, love to get into their tanks and have a big old barney with Johnny Foreigner, celebrating afterwards with a hammock of pork scratchings and a decanter of finest Bovril. You can now do the first part in Company of Heroes 2 standalone expansion The British Forces, which released on Steam a few days ago. The launch trailer, above, features the UK's biggest Ben, and words emblazoned with the Union Flag—that's how you know it's Britain-themed.

The British Forces adds new commanders, units and multiplayer maps, along with supposedly improved motion capture animations, and purportedly characterful troops from across the UK's varied regions. "An international cast of actors from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and New-Zealand bring the units to life," Relic sez, "with accents ranging from the posh elite to the working class. The writing of the units audio cues was also given special attention in order to ensure the various regional differences and rivalries among the British subjects stand out".

Tom Senior's time with the game backs that up. "Officers deliver understated warnings in clipped queen's english while infantrymen sit in ditches and go on about wanking."

That's...that's all I've ever wanted from a strategy game.

Braden Chan is an Associate Game Designer at Relic Entertainment working on Company of Heroes—specifically Company of Heroes 2: The British Forces, which comes out this Thursday. While his graphics card may be old, the piano, sound mixer, and giant speakers give me the feeling Braden is more focused on an a high quality audio experience than a cutting edge visual one. He was kind enough to show us how he works and plays, and tell us about why he loves Warcraft 3 more than any other game. 

What's in your PC?

• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9650 @ 3.00GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
• Motherboard: Maximus II Formula
• Memory: 8192MB RAM
• Drives: 3 x 500GB HDD
• Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
• Case: Antec Twelve Hundred V3 Black Steel ATX Full Tower
• Mouse: Logitech MX518
• Keyboard: Logitech Deluxe 250
• Mixer: Pioneer DJM 800
• Speakers: KRK Rokit 8

What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup?

Instead of using an audio box to run my inputs through my studio monitor, I am actually using a DJ mixer which provides the same effect. It also gives me the flexibility to hook up my laptop into the mixer and run audio through my monitors that way as well. It's great as I can still control the levels of each device I have plugged in. The Pioneer DJM-800 mixer also has the flexibility to host multiple inputs like RCA, XLR, etc.

What are you playing right now?

I'm currently engaged in a lot of Counter-Strike Global Offensive, Company of Heroes 2, and I occasionally play Starcraft 2.

Whats always within arm's reach on your desk?

My phone or a glass of water.

What's your favorite game and why?

Warcraft III will always hold a special place in my heart as my favorite game. It was one of the first of its kind as an RTS/RPG hybrid. Many of the mechanics that were created laid the path for other games such as DOTA, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft. I took that game really seriously and I qualified for WCG Canada in 2007. I just really enjoyed the emphasis on combat and micro that it had. As a player, you really had to create a strategy based on the heroes you were going to use. On top of that, you would build an army that would support your hero. Unlike Starcraft, you didn't really have to focus too much on your economy and macro. I think that is what I enjoyed the most about it; focusing on my units rather than my workers collecting gold.

The British Forces are set to storm Company of Heroes 2 on September 3. How would you like to fight for Her Majesty's gov't sooner? A limited free trial runs from 6pm BST / 10am PDT today through to Wednesday 2, and we have 5,000 Steam keys to give away that will let you in.

To enter, simply click through to the giveaway page, pop in your email address and the key will appear. First come, first served.

Enter the giveaway here

The British Forces adds the British army to Company of Heroes 2 for use in multiplayer and skirmish modes. The pack also adds eight new maps and three commanders that unlock the Brits' most powerful abilities, like the one that lets you drop gliders full of commandos on enemy units. Find out more in our British Forces hands-on from last week. The expansion has excellent swearing.

The British Forces goes live on Thursday and costs 9.99 / $12.99.

The British Forces is a standalone multiplayer expansion for Company of Heroes 2. You might see some reviews for the expansion appearing today, but we're waiting to see how the new army performs in a live multiplayer environment this weekend before assigning a score when the pack is released on September 3. Here are some impressions from the single-player skirmishes I've played so far.

The British Forces commando drop is one of the most spectacular things you can do in an RTS, and this is a genre that lets you build huge spider bots and crash moons into planets. Instead of parachuting troops into enemy territory, the ingeniously bonkers British solution crashes a glider full of special forces onto a street. First there's the noise: the plunging scream of the incoming plane. Then it smashes into the ground, losing its wings to the surrounding buildings. Then the vessel comes to a screeching halt, and commandos matter-of-factly hop out of a hatch at the back and try to kill everyone nearby.

It's a bold move. Crazy, even. But with a few upgrades the commando drop becomes Company of Heroes 2's loudest and flashiest smash-and-grab solution. With the correct investment the drop can be presaged by a preparatory recon flight and a strafing run from a pair of Hawker Tornadoes. The torrent of machinegun fire instantly pins enemy forces in the vicinity, leaving them exposed to the short-range killing potential of the commandos' Stens. Another upgrade turns the remains of the glider into a forward base that resupplies friendly squads. Point a commando drop at a victory point and you can make it your home in minutes.

The commando drop is very much the "hammer" of the British Forces' branching "hammer and anvil" doctrines. These divergent base upgrades let you choose between aggressive unit types and expanded building powers, but both options feel more defensive than other Company of Heroes 2 armies. British forces excel at holding ground and then softening up enemies with bombardment. This turtling tendency is reflected in the potent cover bonuses afforded to ordinary infantrymen, and an upgrade that lets them throw a flare to call in explosive support from artillery cannons mounted on your base. Hold-and-bombard

I've been having great fun with the British in conventional one-vs-one AI battles so far; it's fun to lock down sections of the map with Bofor emplacements and repel assaults with crunchy artillery barrages. Against soft targets, the British are terrifying. The Churchill Crocodile flamethrower tank spews liquid fire at surprising range and burst-fire artillery and flame mortars can dig infantry out of cover quickly. It's also interesting to work around the limitations of the British Forces, particularly the frailty of their armoured divisions.

The Brits can field various iterations of the Churchill and Cromwell tank lines but both falter when facing powerful German tanks. This gives the British the potential to fade in the late game when the map turns into tank town. Their anti-tank infantry options, such as the haphazard spring-action PIATs, struggle to reliably hold back heavy tanks, so the British must rely on stationary heavy anti-tank emplacements and the expensive-but-amazing Sherman Firefly: a variant of the stalwart US tank which bolts on a ludicrously huge 17-pounder gun and optional rockets.

The British Forces expansion follows CoH2's tendency to pick out the most interesting troops and vehicles of the period, not just the most conventional. Relic decided to add the AEC Mk 2 armoured car after seeing the vehicle in Ardennes during a press tour. The vehicles are beautifully modelled, and a number of new weapon effects have been added to sell the new ordnance. Armour-penetrating rounds have their own characteristic noise and feel, and the Crocodile's oily jets of flame recall the horror of the original weapon. The army's most extreme bombardments are some of the biggest in the game so far.

The British Forces have a lot of character too, thanks to some top swearing. Troops hail from different regions of the UK. The royal engineers are from Wales; commandos are from Ireland. Officers deliver understated warnings in clipped queen's english while infantrymen sit in ditches and go on about wanking. The British Forces' ability to comically insult each other under fire is frequently hilarious. Few RTS games try to endear you to your units, but the rapport makes battles feel more meaningful.

The expansion also includes eight new maps, mostly spread across Germany. The dark, industrial zones such as the port of Hamburg feel quite familiar, but deform in new ways when blown apart by artillery. The prettier maps are set in rural areas, and modders will benefit from new terrain pieces such as picturesque German houses and castle ruins that offer claustrophobic and tense infantry scuffles. I can't wait to drop commando gliders on all of them when the multiplayer servers go live.