Company Of Heroes 2 Review 2023
Normando Chapman
From Sicily to Rome, you'll push your way north, fighting the Nazis in random skirmishes and incredible bespoke missions. It's a huge turn-based campaign that serves up a slew of spectacular, tactically interesting RTS battles, and it should be the most exciting thing Relic has ever done. Lamentably, this is not the case due to the absence of one crucial ingredient: it isn't remotely dynamic.
As an RTS, Company of Heroes 3 is right up there with the very best, but Relic's experimental campaign is, tragically, a bit of a dud. Across my nearly 40-hour march to Rome, I encountered hardly any resistance at all. The only time my adversary attempted to take back a town I'd captured, it was a scripted event. Aside from that, the Nazis seemed resigned to let me keep everything I'd claimed. Regardless of the difficulty settings, aggression is a foreign concept to them.
If one of your companies encounters an enemy company, they'll probably try to attack you after you've finished your turn, so they are at least willing to defend their territory, but they never go beyond that. This renders the campaign largely pointless, turning it into a perfunctory saunter. You'll be told to defend towns and build emplacements to help with this, but doing so is a waste of companies and resources when the enemy will never venture south.
The Italian campaign, then, is fundamentally broken. This is especially frustrating when it's clear how great it could have been. And even in this seemingly unfinished state, good ideas bubble to the surface, if you can push past the very rough UI and impotent opponent.
Each company you requisition is a powerful toolkit that contains not just a distinct selection of units you'll field in the RTS scraps, but also a range of abilities that help on the campaign map. The Indian Artillery Company, for instance, can bombard enemy positions, softening up towns, removing emplacements, blowing up bridges and weakening enemy companies. So there are a lot of targets to destroy, but also lots of opportunities to build.
Along with the emplacements you can pointlessly cover Italy in, conquest provides yet more things to spend your resources on. Capture an airfield and you can start sending out reconnaissance planes to remove the fog of war, or bombers to prepare targets for a ground assault. Capturing ports, meanwhile, increases your population cap and gives you more ships, which can strike at enemy targets from the sea. Together these give you a tonne of options for how to approach every assault.
The bonuses you'll receive are sometimes pretty helpful if not especially flashy, like reduced ability cooldowns, but when it comes to developing the relationships that unlock them, there's a serious lack of friction. While it initially seems like the tension between the trio will force you to make tough calls, in reality it seems like you'd really have to work hard not to make all three your BFFs. I got quite a lot of notifications about how I'd lost loyalty with Valenti because I was rather aggressive in my 'liberation' of Italy, but there were no consequences, because simply playing the game ensures that you're constantly impressing them. Win enough fights and Valenti doesn't give a shit how many Italian towns you completely demolish.
Every company has a fantastic hook, mind you, from the tank-heavy US Armored Company to the sneaky US Airborne Company. And while they all have their own unique tricks, they're all incredibly versatile, too, more than capable of taking on any challenge, just in slightly different ways. The tactical pause system makes getting to grips with each company, and the units within them, a lot easier, giving you the space to set up and coordinate more elaborate attacks, or create a chain of orders. You can take all the time you need to throw down some smoke grenades, move your gun crews into position, call down an airstrike and send some brave lads into a fortified building to breach it, before unpausing the action and watching it all play out like a deadly ballet.
While the campaign's storytelling lacks impact, the missions themselves are a pleasantly diverse bunch, running the gamut from huge, multi-phase epic confrontations with offensive and defensive portions to smaller, focused scenarios where you're setting up traps for convoys or hunting down tank commanders.
The North African maps are also a big change of pace from their Italian counterparts. The frequency of the wide, open spaces initially makes them seem less tactical, but they are perfect for the DAK, a faction that's all about tanks. The desert really lets these behemoths rips, in turn emphasising some of Company of Heroes 3's new features, like tank riding and side armour. Tanks are more versatile, but also require a bit more micromanagement, blessing these fights with more tension, even as you ride into battle with the deadliest of monsters.
Together the two campaigns give you plenty of battles, but the multiplayer and skirmish modes extend that even further, letting you fight other players or go on a good old fashioned comp stomp as one of the four factions (US Forces, British Forces, Wehrmacht, Afrikakorps). This quartet can then be further specialised in-game by picking specific battlegroup upgrade paths that reflect the companies of the campaigns.
The campaign AI, at least in the RTS layer, is serviceable if conservative, so it's really in multiplayer where the depth of Company of Heroes 3's strategy is truly revealed, and its most exciting confrontations. 14 maps are already in play, and mod support means we should see more appear courtesy of the community after launch. I expect to spend a lot of time here now that I've finished my tour of duty in the campaigns, and I've already had a blast blowing up (and getting blown up by) my fellow critics.
Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog. "}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Fraser BrownSocial Links NavigationOnline EditorFraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.
The Italian campaign simply doesn't work as anything other than a miserable framework for delivering skirmishes and missions that the previous two games served up better. What may have been a triumphant and explosive RTS campaign is instead a massive dud.
If you ignore all of that story and campaign context, which you might, the scenario and map design in both North Africa and Italy are actually quite good. The maps consistently present fun situations that understand how maneuver is at the heart of Company of Heroes firefights. It's so much fun to maneuver units from place to place, with infantry vaulting over obstacles or diving for cover as vehicles struggle to navigate cramped roadways or tanks smash through walls and buildings.
Speaking of which, CoH3's four skirmish factions stand out as a remix of, and set of highlights from, the series' past. For example, the focus of the campaigns being earlier in the war leaves some tanks out entirely, like the ubiquitous Panther and infamous King Tiger, and draws in some famous early-war vehicles like the dual-gunned Grant tank and Panzer III. Americans are fast-moving and aggressive, inspired by the first Company of Heroes. The British forces are a diverse set of straightforward unit types, unlike their prior incarnations as the complex faction, and have surprise appearances by some exceptional elite units. The regular German Wehrmacht is just as defensive-minded and tough as ever, but this incarnation is notably absent their heaviest vehicles, instead emphasizing diverse combined arms. Finally, the Deutsches Afrikakorps is a mobile, focused force that can both call in specialized Italian allies and transition to a hard hitting armored fist late-game.
Writing this review hurt my feelings. The Company of Heroes series is near and dear to my heart \u2013 all three of them are real-time strategy games that cut to the core of the genre, focusing on overarching strategic decisions coupled with tactical troop movements and a battlefield that truly matters. I'm pleased to say that Company of Heroes 3 implements those series fundamentals quite well in a gentle remix that brings the series to diverse theaters of World War 2 that it hadn't touched yet. What I'm very displeased about is that the ambitious Italian campaign mode is incredibly disappointing. While individual missions and scenarios within the strategic sandbox are strong and even thrilling at times, almost every feature on the strategic map doesn't work, either because it's bugged or because it's such middle-of-the-road game design that it's simply boring.
There are actually two single-player campaigns in CoH3. The larger one is the Italian Campaign, a broad, turn-based strategic mode on a large map of central and southern Italy that has you capture territory town by town, and took me about 25 hours to complete the first time around. It has theoretically complex systems in which your armies \u2013 called companies (with heroes in them) \u2013 capture towns and ports using deployable air power and naval fleet movements, and build emplacements to defend territory or provide offensive bonuses in battles. It's all very visually similar to the setup of the Total War series.
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