CoH always looked and felt a bit better than CoH2 in how it played, at least to me that is.
There's something about that art style and more gritty feeling from the 2000s that really did it.
I mean the game still has around 2000 people playing it daily and it's like, 15 years old now. Not a lot of games can boast with that at that age which I think is proof in itself.
Of course many people are playing mods as well out of those 2k so again, modding and the community behind it are big parts of CoH.
Because its 15 years old and still wipes its ass with Dota, LoL, Starcraft. It bugs me like hell that these games with Robot animations and child birthday effects are so much more popular than coh