Company of Heroes 3 review – tanks for memory

The icy forests of Ardennes Assault have been gone for eight years now and I was excited to begin our review of Company of Heroes 3. On paper the concept was perfect: bring the non-linear campaign added to the RTS series to this fantastic addition. a Company of Heroes 2 and expand it to include all of southern Italy. While the combat still retains Relic’s exceptional ability for interesting maps and quick team battles, the single player campaign map of Italy is a mess, mired in half-baked ideas that make the campaign confusing, repetitive, and frustrating. .

Company of Heroes 3’s campaign in Italy places you at the head of a joint Allied invasion, a combined expedition of British and American forces that finds support in the local Italian guerrillas. After a brief training segment in Sicily, they all board a ship to set foot on the Italian mainland, eventually connecting with friendly seaports on the Adriatic coast and moving north to Rome.

However, while Ardennes Assault was a limited map set in dense winter forests along the French-Belgian border, Company of Heroes 3’s main campaign covers almost all of Italy south of the 42nd parallel north, divided into dozens of territories. . Control of these territories grants resources and access to basic facilities such as airports, naval docks, and hospitals.

By protecting seaports and airstrips, I can buy new “companies” to work in Italy. There are several varieties: US paratroopers, special forces, and armored vehicles; British infantry and Indian support and auxiliary artillery. Company type determines the deck of units and special abilities that are available when real-time battles begin, with each unit gradually unlocking additional abilities and more specialized units, such as heavy tanks and devastating airborne support attacks over time. as they acquire veteran status. In the battle.

The real-time tactical combat is exactly the same as I remember from Company of Heroes 2. In many campaign skirmishes, I quickly send out squads of infantry and scouts to capture map nodes until I see German troops, how much zoom. Bring your troops under fire by ordering them to take cover and throw grenades. Snipers can take up positions on towers and soldiers can hide in buildings and shoot Wehrmacht forces out of windows.

The standard missions are naturally the highlight of the campaign. These are summer blockbusters: technically simple, yet dramatic and bombastic, the rugged Italian countryside provides the perfect setting for daring raids on fortified mountain redoubts and tank battles in rustic piazzas. The bricks and tiles on the roofs echo from the buildings as infantry squads hurl grenades to take out snipers or machine gun nests, and soldiers run for cover near the smoking hulks of tanks in distress.

Unlockable and upgradable special abilities add to the Hollywood factor: throbbing drone propellers when Spitfires launch strafing and dive-bombing missions, and off-map artillery barrages unleash geysers of earth and fire when they hit their targets.

The drive north to Rome culminates in the Battle of Monte Cassino, the historic attack on the anchor of the Gustav Line that largely drove the Allied forces out of northern Italy between December 1943 and June 1944. The battle itself is classic Company of Heroes: I. send my infantry and airborne troops to the small town at the bottom of the hill to establish themselves in the town hall before sending squads to clear the nearby hotel of Germans and find local supporters. We then went up the mountain road that leads to the Benedictine abbey, coming under heavy artillery fire on the way.

The central story missions aren’t all that different from what Company of Heroes 2 created almost a decade ago, but they’re pretty fun and play out on a series of increasingly impressive maps. Combined into a traditional RTS game, they will be a big part of the series. Instead, Relic has placed them on a Total War-esque campaign map that spreads the action into a somewhat meaningless and largely boring “strategy” layer that seems to lack important elements.

Some of the issues with the Italian campaign are minor annoyances, like low-res images in some menus or excessive barking (every time!) from an American general urging me to disable the rail artillery at Anzio. A bigger problem is the German AI, which never resists my actions to take over the territory. From time to time, German companies attack mine, but the computer doesn’t try to return the cities I’ve liberated, which simplifies everything. I can send my troops wherever I want and it feels more like Heroes of Might and Magic than a traditional war game or even a Total War campaign.

The campaign in Italy also does not convey the strategic objectives well. NPC advisors provide conflicting priorities, but some quests, like the Assault on Monte Cassino, have conditions that must be met before they can be attempted. The list in the upper left corner of the screen is a simplified view of the most recent quests offered, but does not provide a detailed description of what needs to be done to complete multi-step tasks.

Because of this, missions like Monte Cassino are present on the map, but will artificially crash when a squad approaches. Only when I had a squad near a city could I click on the nameplate and find a list of steps to take before I could start the mission itself. It’s frustrating and I had to reload old save files multiple times because I didn’t know what to plan for.

The population cap mechanic limits the number of units you can field at one time, and the only way to increase this is to capture seaports. It prevents a lot from happening in the early corners, and once it’s all up and running, there’s a lot of campaign to go where not much happens. Buttons are not clearly labeled and the processes for sending troops by air or sea are difficult and time consuming.

None of this refers to the German “Operation” Afrika Korps, which is also available in single player mode. It’s more like a traditional Company of Heroes campaign; is a sequence of scenarios linked in a fixed narrative order covering Erwin Rommel’s tenure as a “desert fox” in occupied Libya.

However, the campaign in Italy is the highlight and I cannot recommend it in its current state. There are a few things missing that would be easy to fix – the full UI/UX with additional information on current mission objectives is a notable example. Giving the Germans a stronger presence on the campaign map would also go a long way towards justifying the open sandbox format.

However, in its current form, the campaign is mostly cluttered – there is still a certain order in which the main missions must be completed, and this directly contradicts the expansive map, which seems perfect for creative strategic decision-making, But this is not the case. That’s not enough to support all the different structures, logistical mechanics, and provinces that Company of Heroes 3 throws at you.

However, while I complain about the campaign, the combat, both single and multiplayer, which is still as exciting as ever, is still the Company of Heroes I remember fondly. Not much has changed here, and perhaps there is an unfinished Italian campaign, as Relic felt they needed to introduce a new feature to sell us on a new entry in the series. It really isn’t, and these action-packed classic battles are some of the best in the series. This is what made me trudge through the Campanian hills on my way to Rome.