Company of Heroes 3 Review

When I was a kid, I had a huge hamper full of plastic army men. I would often play with them on a huge mound of sand my dad used to mix for cement (pretty sure tens of army men ended up in the house foundations). In my head these games were vast campaigns fought across multiple battlefields filled with explosions, destruction, panicked retreats, and rallying maneuvers. Over the years I’ve played a few war games and they seldom came close to the vivid conflicts on that sand mound. That is until I played Relic’s new Real-time-Strategy Company of Heroes 3.

Now, to clarify, this review is based off Single Player content only. My dabbling in the versus multiplayer saw me outclassed by better players and it would be hard for me to write about balance among the different factions and units. I will say that the game offers various combinations of versus, and co-op play against the competent AI.

In single player there is a choice of two campaigns – Italy and North Africa – or skirmish mode. There is a comprehensive tutorial that lays out the controller mapping.  This sets up the basic objectives: how to move units, use their skills, how to heal, to upgrade, to retreat, and how to changes lines of fire and order tanks around.

For someone that rarely plays RTS this is paced really well. I felt like I was flanking enemies, throwing grenades, and destroying cover but also learning some of the more complicated actions without being overburdened. The game even introduces a teaser mission where enemies don’t move much that allowed me to apply what I had learned.

Once that is done, Company of Heroes then introduces the player to the open world map. This plays a lot like the Total War series, with units moving around a board. As the player moves the units, missions will appear where the player has to balance the requirements of their main objectives with the potential rewards for the side-distractions. On top of these considerations different military factions of the allied forces will make requests and depending on what the player choses will align themselves and offer bonuses to the player. These requests vary from taking a specific strategic point, or detouring around a mountain to help partisan forces. To further complicate things each unit can gain experience and improve, so it is possible to make them better at different scenarios and make it more painful to lose them.

This offers a solid structure to the combat, and gave me the impression of being part of a bigger army, and that my actions were only a subset of wider interests in play.

The encounters change in style, from holding a point in the face of encroaching forces, taking of specific points, traditional RTS objectives where it is just about obliterating enemy units.

The combat itself gives a real sense of scale. This is aided by the animations of each of the units. The way a heavy machinegun unit unpacks their gun and then sets up looks great, but it doesn’t stop there. On foot units will dive to the ground when under enemy fire, sidle up to a wall and peek over, or go through a ‘let’s see what happens’ motion as they throw a grenade. These details breathe life into every fight, it gave me this feeling of commanding real humans. To add to that the way buildings can be demolished by canons and artillery sparked my imagination. This was what I saw in my head as I played in the sand as a child.

The scenarios are built to feed into this imagination. For example, in one event I was required to take a square in the middle of a small village. Equipped with two squads of riflemen, a group of Gurkhas, a sniper, and a half track with a mounted machinegun. I was able to put the Sniper in a belltower, then move the riflemen up the main road. The Sniper started taking shots at the enemies and drawing their attention, which allowed for my riflemen to get close enough to flush the bazooka crew out of their foxhole and straight into the firing line of the half track. This left the Gurkhas to throw a volley of grenades at a unit attempting to hide in the church and demolish the side of it. The flourish to each unit’s movement sold me on this game.

That said, there are some drawbacks.

A lot of work has been put into making sure that the myriad commands map to a combination of controller presses. Real attention has been placed on having good, context-sensitive commands too. That said, when things started to get hectic (which happened a lot), there were moments where I found myself floundering.

Thankfully there is a faithful Left Stick button that instantly paused the fight and allowed for me to issue commands at my own pace. This is good but did turn some fights into stop motion events, where I was pausing every few seconds to micromanage my units. It was a solution but one that detracted from the grandeur of watching Company of Heroes unfold.

The other big problem is that there felt like there were encounters that were unwinnable on first turn. Early in the Italian campaign, the axis counterattack a small town called Salerno. If a unit is setup to defend the player must hold off encroaching enemy units. They are given 2 minutes to reinforce some bridges and then fight waves of enemies. It is just not entirely clear that there will be bombing runs that destroy most of the premade defences, nor is the enemy’s potential threat explained. For me, it resulted in playing for 15 minutes, losing, and then replaying again once I understood what was expected. This happened often with me investing a good chunk of time into a fight only to fail and try again. For people used to playing on PC and burning away hours on this sort of thing it probably makes a lot of sense, for a console player this feels like a big ask.

Speaking of big asks, the text and information onscreen is going to be overwhelming for newcomers to the genre. Given the size of the text as well, I would advise everyone be ready to scoot a little closer to the screen to play. Maybe uncomfortably so if you console is setup on a 50+ inch TV. Otherwise, there is going to be missed information that could make or break a sortie.

With all the said, Company of Heroes 3 is an incredibly good attempt at transferring a hefty RTS game to a console, with only games like Halo Wars beating it in terms of accessibility. For those that have wanted to get stuck into a meaty, urgent, World War II game and don’t want to sit huddled over a desk, this is a great choice.

Conclusion

Relic have done phenomenal work porting Company of Heroes 3 over to consoles. It does a great job of onboarding newcomers to the RTS genre and provides hours of content. That said, there is still a hefty learning curve and time investment which is going to cause some to struggle.