![]() Company of Heroes 3 lays off the constant grinding of new units and laborious resource management that's so prevalent in the genre, instead favouring a focus on taking small and highly manageable squads into scraps that have you concentrate on moment-to-moment movement and actual tactics in the heat of battle. With lots of cool upgrades to unlock for each of your unit types, and abilities that let you call devastating airstrikes on enemy tank convoys or parachute in special forces to help out in close encounters, these are entertainingly action-packed battles, too. Whilst you may find the low-resolution textures on certain sections of the ground a little off-putting (more on this in a bit) you can't help but be impressed by how your vehicles and units react how they move and deteriorate as they take on damage, dust, dirt and so on. This is a lovely looking game for the most part too, certainly in terms of how detailed its vehicles and villages, buildings and enormous bomb blasts are. ![]() Here it's Company of Heroes as you remember it, with a rigid set of missions that take you directly from one scrap to the next, giving you the mighty mechanized forces of the Afrika Korps to blast across some incredibly atmospheric maps with. Moving on to the story mode and, apart from the somewhat controversial decision to have you play as Erwin Rommel as his Afrika Korps stomp through allied forces in North Africa, this is a cracking campaign - a resolutely old-school affair in comparison to the new-fangled dynamism of the Italian portion of the game. Why am I able to capture important ports without a serious counter-attack or switch of tactics from my foe? Where's the pressure and sense of urgency? Turn the difficulty up and it matters a little less, but a more reactive adversary would make for more thrills in this regard. We beat a path through Italy without too much in the way of a pushback from our enemies, and it feels as though the AI could do with being tuned to react to your decisions and movements a little better. ![]() Nothing too major, but we did find that playing on the default difficulty felt strangely easy. There are a few issues with this mode, however. Once you're done making choices, negotiating next moves and dealing with the demands of a host of allied commanders on the main map, you get to drop down to ground level and engage in highly-detailed encounters that feel endlessly fun to toy around with. Where Company of Heroes 3 really succeeds is in giving you this wonderfully detailed Total War-style of map and then successfully managing to merge it with the sort of meaty ground battles you'd expect to find in these games. Starting out at the bottom of Italy, you're on a mission to drive up the length of the country, pushing the Germans back, capturing their bases, taking their supplies, cutting off routes and just basically giving them a right good kicking from air, land and sea. ![]() The map is where you move units around, make choices in where to attack next (will you hit a port for more supplies and warship backup or continue to gain momentum by ploughing ahead?) and you can even auto-resolve battles instead of dropping down to fight through every single combat scenario. Launching into the Italian campaign and you can immediately see that Relic has attempted to branch out and up the ante, taking cues from Creative Assembly's fantastic Total War series to present players with a dynamic tactical map overlay that meshes with the franchise's more traditional top-down skirmishes. interesting), and co-operative and multiplayer offerings that should satiate console-based RTS fans for a good long time to come. There's a ton of content to get stuck into here with a sprawling dynamic Italian campaign, a story mode (where you play as Rommel, which is. We've been blasting through this one on PC since it released on that platform back in February of this year (before moving on to test out the Xbox version), and it makes for a great big meaty chunk of WW2-based strategy goodness. This is deep and addictive real-time strategy that presents its historical battlefields in luxurious detail and gives hardcore fans of the genre lots to dig into games that are still as good to play now as they were when they first blew us away some 17 years ago.Ĭompany Of Heroes 3 finally sees a ten year wait come to an end for those of us who've been chomping at the bit for more Relic magic and, thankfully, it hasn't let us down for the most part. Relic's Company of Heroes series has been doing the rounds on PC since all the way back in 2006 and, especially with regards to the first game, is still considered to be one of the premier RTS franchises out there. ![]()
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