Company of Heroes 2 1.3.8 Mac

45 GB. That is the hard drive space required to deploy the Eastern Front on a Mac. Company of Heroes 2, ported by Feral Interactive, brings Relic's World War II real-time strategy game to macOS with both its single-player campaign and its competitive multiplayer core intact.

Terrain tacticians get a frozen river that can swallow a tank

• Terrain tacticians. The Essence Engine 3.0 makes every crater a new piece of cover and every frozen river a potential trap. If you treat maps as weapons, the destructive environments and ColdTech weather system will keep you busy.
• Multiplayer commanders. The base game fields the Red Army and Wehrmacht. The Western Front Armies expansion adds US Forces and Oberkommando West. This is a game built for players who want to test their build orders against a human opponent.
• Not for casual historians. Someone looking for a guided tour of the war may bounce off the steep learning curve. The single-player campaign exists, but the design pulls hard toward the multiplayer ladder.

Metal under the hood

The Mac version runs on Apple's Metal graphics API, a change that landed in a previous update and sharpens frame pacing on integrated and discrete GPUs alike. The game also carries Feral's TrueSight system, which adjusts unit visibility based on line of sight and cover—a detail that rewards the kind of player who studies a ridgeline before moving a squad.

In day-to-day play, the move to the Master Collection packaging on the Mac App Store means a cleaner first launch. Instead of patching the base game and then activating half a dozen expansions, the whole Eastern Front and all its factions are present as soon as the 45 GB copy finishes. The 1.3.8 fix keeps that bundle stable on recent macOS releases, and the earlier Metal shift shows its worth most in multiplayer lobbies with eight human commanders. Frame drops during heavy blizzard effects on a frozen Don river crossing are rarer now, which matters when a single destroyed half-track can swing a ranked match.

Who feels the cold most

The players who sink the deepest hours are rarely the ones chasing the campaign medals. They tend to fall into two camps.

• Multiplayer regulars who treat each match like a chess clock. The faction spread—Red Army, Wehrmacht, US Forces, Oberkommando West, and later the British Forces—gives them a rotating set of build orders to drill. A player who queues for a 2v2 on a company of heroes 2 mac ladder every evening will notice the Metal back-end most clearly in infantry pathfinding, which gets out of its own way faster than it did under OpenGL.
• Solo strategists replaying Ardennes Assault. That 18-battle U.S. Army campaign rewards a different kind of grit. A commander who loses two squads to a mortar pit in battle seven carries that loss into battle eight. The ColdTech system turns a sudden spring thaw into a supply-line problem, and the Mac version handles those weather transitions without the stutter that used to telegraph an incoming blizzard.

A previous update to version 1.3 brought support for Apple's Metal graphics API, replacing OpenGL for rendering on the Mac.

• macOS 10.14 or later
• 1.8 GHz processor
• 8 GB RAM
• 1 GB graphics memory
• 45 GB free disk space