(It says 0.2 hours played because I had to use a workaround to review this DLC)

I got this on a sale and I still ended up being disappointed.

Things got off to a great start when I was asked to select three commanders out of four. Not a particularly hard choice as the button under the fourth commander said 'Purchase' rather than 'Select'. Yes, that's right, you just paid €40 (I really hope you didn't) and before you even get into a mission you are already offered DLC for your DLC (insert obvious Xzibit joke here).

Having *ahem* chosen three commanders you get dropped into a strategic map of the Ardennes, which you'll have to reclaim piece by piece. The catch here is that you do not get to save and load as you would in the base game. Instead, after a defeat, the strength of your company is reduced and you have to try again. The idea is that all your decisions have added weight as a defeat (or a costly victory) might cost you the entire campaign.

This led to some curious situations where I was asked to 'hold out', failed in doing so, watched helplessly as the Germans leveled my defenses, the camp, and the town a few miles down the road for good measure, and then... I could simply try again. Sporting chaps those Germans.

Aside from that, the system doesn't really encourage experimenting. All changes and losses are permanent. This is particularly frustrating as some maps have a sort of mini game going on. You might find yourself scrambling for abandoned tanks or randomly dropped supplies. But if you a play a certain game type for the first time you don't know exactly what to expect and at the hard difficulty this usually costs you the battle.

The missions then, are too short for my taste. Most if not all of them finish in under half an hour. Combined with the aforementioned mini games, it all feels... cheap. Like the 'the greatest American battle of the War' was finished in an afternoon. Speaking of cheap, you'll recognize several of the mission maps from the multiplayer mode.

Then there is the voice acting, which varies from 'cheesy' to 'awkward' and occasionally dips to 'horrendously bad'. All commanders have bios and some missions have this post-op evaluation by the CO. All three (four?) of them invariably hate war and/or lament the fallen. But it all falls flat thanks to sloppy delivery.

Conclusion: Ardennes Assault tries to make a quick buck out of both the tragedy of the men lost in the Ardennes and the heroism of the Americans who managed to pull through despite the odds. They deserved better however. The game feels cheap with its shameless DLC-DLC, short and uninteresting missions, recycled multiplayer maps and poor voice acting. The save system too, one might call... cheap.

It gets kinda hard if you screw up the order in which you do the missions but overall I like this campaign better than the original CoH2 campaign. It is a lot more interactive in the sense that the control of troops is more first person and you can select which troops will do which mission, kinda like a general I suppose.

its great DLC but a bit over priced