Company of Heroes 3 Review – Italian Front

Company of Heroes is a great series that has a lot of fans due to its thoughtful battle format, tactics, and historical accuracy. Now this brand is receiving the third batch, which we have been able to test in recent weeks. You can read about how Company of Heroes 3 plays in our review.

• Platform: PC (Tested), Planned (PS5, Xbox X/S)
• Publication date: 02/23/2023
• Manufacturer: Relic Entertainment
• Genre: RTS
• Czech localization: Yes
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Data to download:
• Game time: 25 hours (Great Campaign)
• Price: EUR 59.99 (Steam)

The big campaign in Company of Heroes 3 takes you to Italy

The landing in Sicily was relatively successful. Although the army suffered losses, it managed to win back the positions. The problem was that most of the Germans managed to escape, so the old Allied commander gathered his five plums and returned home. Having begun a major campaign to seize Italy, the operation is led by a new henchman who will not give enemy generals a chance for a successful counterattack. And that hero will be none other than you. However, you are not alone in commanding an entire army. First you have a couple, then even a trio of characters. They have a desire to constantly advise you in which direction to move, and as a result, it always depends on you in the first place in which direction the army will go. Your subordinates are not responsible for mistakes, but in the end, you yourself are the first.

Most of the time here you are choosing between a moderate approach, typical of the British, and more aggressive tactics, which suit the Americans. By the way, sometimes the choice in Company of Heroes 3 is not easy. Fortunately, after a while, the path of Italian resistance enters the scene, and with it new opportunities for decision-making. In addition to determining the direction in which the allied forces will move, your decisions also affect the relationship with individual commanders. Being trusted, they give various advantages to units on the strategic map. An American officer offers more effective unit healing to those who obey his orders. British Resistance movement speedup and detailed information about what is happening in enemy territory.

The Italian campaign is somewhat reminiscent of, for example, the concept of the Total War series. Thus, before you is an army consisting of several units of various specializations. With them, you then move around the map, occupy cities with them, and gradually form a form of conflict. It is also possible to build various buildings on the main map, which subsequently help to hold important strategic positions, eliminate aircraft or supply ubiquitous units. Your goal is to occupy Italy from beginning to end.

Most of the time you are fighting regular battles taking place in fairly similar locations. Company of Heroes 3 also has story passages, but it cannot be said that their depth can be assessed exclusively positively. It’s just that they are here and expanding the plot, which, at least in Italy, is nothing world-shaking. But that’s not what this campaign is about. The player’s ability to effectively move forward and counter the German superiority plays a key role here, which from the very beginning has decently lined up positions and a bunch of cities that are literally waiting to fall into the hands of your troops. I have to say for myself that I am a little confused by the handling of this campaign. Maybe it’s the fault of my expectations, but I assumed that some passages would be more nutritious.

The German operation has great strength

Certain phases of the campaign depend only on arriving at the location with a tank, soldier, or supporting heavy equipment. A few shots are fired and the fun ends. Initially, I thought that literally every city would be fought over, which theoretically could increase the level of stereotyping, but it will seem to the player that he is advancing through a really heavily occupied enemy territory that needs to be wrested from the clutches of enemy forces. Also, I felt that the strength of the unit itself didn’t matter as much as it could be given.

For example, the influence of the armies could be higher, because of which some battles would have to start not with construction, but with a direct clash of two armies, in which the larger one would clearly have an advantage, and the weaker one would have the general. will have to download more. As a result of the meeting, where you are attacked by AI, are also funny. Instead of the stronger company being able to break in, it often lets you take the lead and take the points, which it then painstakingly fights for. The funny thing is, when you have taken all the points, there are about 30 seconds left, and the game informs you that enemy reinforcements are coming. As if their arrival could really change anything, right?

In fact, I have never been put in the role of attackers, rolling with the army towards the German defenders, waiting for the enemy army to strike them. At least not in the format in which the players are attacked by Nazi units. However, in order not only to criticize the large campaign of Company of Heroes 3, it must be said that the gradual development of individual companies is carried out well and in the end offers you slightly different combat technologies associated with subsequent options for each unit.

Despite the format of unit development and story quests, I consider the general format of a large campaign incomplete. The creators did not really manage to use its potential, which is why I liked the North African storyline in Company of Heroes 3 more than the Italian campaign. He had several strengths. One of them was undoubtedly the brilliant Erwin Rommel, whose tactics could always lead the Afrika Korps to victory. However, the field marshal himself was not the main character of the story. Instead, one of the inhabitants of the Middle East presented his story here. If there was one thing that really elevated the single-player experience in my eyes, it was the storytelling with a lot of mission variety.

Prim plays a solid foundation in Company of Heroes 3

But enough about the campaign. It’s time to take a look at the gameplay itself. It does not fundamentally differ from the format proposed by the previous parts. In practice, this means that you have a stationary base around which you build production buildings and send units from there. They are responsible for allocating resources. Stations of manpower, ammunition, fuel and victory points are available. The struggle for strategic positions is always unnerving, because even a well-thought-out operation can sometimes turn into a massacre. Fortunately, the infantry can respond to such situations with a quick retreat, able to get them out of the firing range before they are completely destroyed.

Units here are divided into infantry, auxiliary equipment led by artillery and, of course, tanks, on which, to a certain extent, you can build more than one strategy. However, you cannot completely rely on them, because almost every soldier in the field has some kind of special ability that he can activate for a certain number of bullets and, for example, send a heavy tank straight to hell. As in previous parts, in Company of Heroes 3 vehicles have different hit zones, so where one is vulnerable, another can have almost 100% resistance.

As is often the case with representatives of the Company of Heroes series, tactics play a role here. Most of the time, you can’t just stumble upon your enemies and expect dizzying success. It is important to use cover, work with the format of the building, and often work with the terrain as well. The latter can save your tank from a last hit or, conversely, help you gain a fire advantage, thanks to which you can destroy, for example, an entire squad of tanks with one gun. Also important is the speed associated with the need to choose the distribution of forces, which are always lacking. However, the real impact of your decisions in this regard will become known, especially when playing in multiplayer, in which you will use all the skills gained in the campaigns.

In total, in multiplayer, you can always choose one of four unique factions. For the allies, the Americans and the British are at your disposal, while Germany sends the Wehrmacht and armored divisions from Africa to the battlefield. Each side brings several different units to the field, which effectively changes the style of your game. Americans are masters of the infantry. The Afrikakorpus relies on heavy tanks and the British, they have a combination of everything, but the effectiveness of individual parts is not so high, so you have to combine as many as possible. I found the balance decent and I really can’t wait for the devs to add more factions.

However, the essence of the entire gameplay is undoubtedly how the destruction system in Company of Heroes 3 is handled. In my opinion, this is a really strong factor to admire while playing. The way buildings, walls and the whole game world collapse is simply divine. Enemies have practically nowhere to hide from you, because with more intense artillery fire you are able to turn initially very nice places almost into a lunar landscape, to some extent representing the course and intensity of the battles that were fought there. To be honest, I would appreciate this element in more strategies, but I understand that it will probably remain the property of this brand in the long term.

It would be a shame to miss Company of Heroes 3

If there is currently a strategy game on the market that builds on the solid foundation of the series, then it is undoubtedly Company of Heroes 3. This tactical real-time strategy from the Second World War tells another story of one of the greatest conflicts in the history of mankind. This time Italy is in the spotlight. The tasks of the main campaign are not bad, but in general they did not seem to me comprehensive enough, and I would not be afraid to call some passages ill-conceived. Flaws in the beauty of the main campaign are saved by the operation for the Germans, which swept across North Africa.

The main driving force behind everything is also the customized gameplay, which is at such a high level thanks to the fact that there is already something behind this brand. The factions have been greatly improved, as has the destruction that is the essence of every battle. Watching cities collapse in Company of Heroes 3 is something truly breathtaking. As for the flies, there aren’t that many, the biggest one is perhaps the processing of a large campaign in conjunction with the AI, which even at higher levels sometimes acts quite sluggishly. For myself, despite these ailments, I would recommend the new representative of the Company of Heroes series to anyone who loves an honest RTS.