see deal Company of Heroes 2 - PC $39.99 on Gamestop

For the Russian soldiers in World War II’s Eastern Front, the melting snows must have been an amazing sight. Fighting for your country, watching countless thousands of your countrymen die to both Nazi aggression and environmental exposure was doubtless brutal for morale. But in Company of Heroes 2

Less interesting doesn’t mean uninteresting, mind you. W hen compared to the winter maps we’ve seen there simply seems to be a lot less going in spring. You don’t have to worry about the fury of what Eastern Front soldiers came to refer to as General Winter; the weather isn’t out to kill you. You still have to worry about the rest of what’s made the series so popular, though, such as intricately detailed mortar explosions that turn your soldiers into hamburger, bullets that’ll knock them off their feet, and armored tanks that can roll over them as if they were simply debris on the road.Weather conditions have never really affected how you played Company of Heroes in the past, but in CoH 2 it essentially gives Relic double the multiplayer maps. The map I played on took place in spring, but it was easy to see how things would change if it was colder. For instance my soldiers could cross the river at specific points, slowly plodding through the knee high water during spring. In winter, however, there’d be more potential crossing points, most of which wouldn’t really slow my soldiers down, but would present the added risk of having the ice shot out from underneath them. Likewise in springtime my soldiers could veer off the road and run through low grasses and brush, whereas in winter they’d have to contend with heavy snow falls, moving laboriously slow and leaving tracks the enemy could follow. Springtime understandably forgoes these weather consequences, enabling you to focus on the traditional minutia of combat more than the panic and unpredictability of winter matches allow.It’s too bad that what we’ve seen of CoH 2 at this point still feels like the work in progress it is. As a fan, I can’t help but wonder about the systems they’re changing, such as the still unshown commander skill trees. There’s obviously a lot of thought being put into changing things they were unsatisfied with from the first games (such as how machine gun nests can only be built by capture points now, or that veterancy can net additional abilities for units), but by and large Relic’s keeping much of it under their hat for now.

Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him at @Chufmoney on Twitter or at Ant-IGN on IGN.