Company of Heroes: Eastern Front
Company of Heroes: Eastern Front
Retreat!
With Company of Heroes: Eastern Front , the third and final add-on to the main game Company of Heroes is making an appearance ... Wait a minute: the third add-on? Didn't I say in my review of Tales of Valor that there were only two expansions in total? Good eye! Eastern Front is actually not a conventional add-on from the developer, but an extremely extensive and - according to the ratings - high-quality modification that expands the main game to include the Soviet Union as a playable faction as well as the eponymous Eastern Front. In fact, this privately programmed addition was so successful that THQ itself featured it on the main game's Steam page - so it can't be that bad. And since it fits in quite well with world politics and I just saw the score in front of me, I thought to myself: why not?
Probably because it's a fan product. Even if I hold modders and their creations in the highest honor and Eastern Front is probably a great expansion, the score falls well short of my expectations. Okay, compared to the main game and with top-class composers such as Jeremy Soule, Inon Zur and Ian Livingstone, they were in unattainable spheres anyway, but there was hope that something on a comparable level would be offered here. You don't. With his limited resources, Liverpool composer Alex Cottrell has probably done the best he could for the modification, but this is in a much lower league than the actual score.
We hear typical Russian/Eastern European tropes with a Kalinka and polka character, the melodies fluctuate between expectedly inciting and trying to be interesting, but are never really convincing. What particularly disturbed me was the attempt to integrate the classic male choir, as it spurs on heroic deeds in Empire Earth or Rome: Total War , for example, and is inextricably linked to the musical image of 'the Russian' in the music. Due to a lack of willing singers, a vocal track was apparently simply converted for Streets of Stalingrad in order to create the desired pitches and melodies. This not only sounds like little effort, but simply doesn't cut it. Even the little gimmicks such as the mixture of mischievous and serious sounds in Far from Over, Russia Waits don't help, as they lead us to expect more from the score than it can ultimately deliver.
All in all, it's a rather unimpressive composition, but its rating should not reflect on the quality of the mod or my respect for the work invested in it. I find the result of a 13 track long score impressive and quite presentable, but in the end it should be clear that we (unfortunately) do not have a masterpiece here, but a fan product for the showreel.
