Continuation of the historical strategy in real time. The events of the third part unfold in the Mediterranean. The game has an exciting story campaign, the largest in the history of the Company of Heroes series. Battles with the enemy take place surrounded by picturesque Italian mountain passes, coastal landscapes and vast African deserts. In addition to the tasks themselves, the game has a tactical map, as in the games of the Total War series.
Review of Company of Heroes 3. Good as always, huge as ever
Butcher79
Company of Heroes 3 proves that the developers at Relic Entertainment are RTS masters. It also shows that even the master can sometimes make mistakes and make strange, incomprehensible decisions.
Nearly a decade later, the series Company of Heroes comes back with a new part. At first glance, the "troika" is very similar to its predecessor. Relic Entertainment clearly didn't want to spoil the cycle formula that fans all over the world loved. While the Canadian developer hasn't failed to make a few significant changes, they add new layers to an old concept rather than get in the way of proven solutions. Veterans of "loners" and "girls" will feel в CoH3 like at home.
However, they soon learn that the name has grown to colossal proportions, its layout has become brighter and less associated with military colors, and the chaos that previously reigned in it has become easier to control. In this metaphor, I dressed the three most important elements that distinguish the Company of Heroes 3 from the previous parts of the series - incomparably large campaign, changed graphic style and active pause. The latter is tactically more important than divided attention and click speed.
All roads lead to Rome
But before we look at the mechanics, let's take a look at the plot of the third Band of Brothers. More specifically, stories there are two campaigns - North African (simply called operation) and Italian. The first is completely linear, in which it resembles the stories from "one and two." We've been making our way to Libya since 1942 to - to the delight of fans of the series demanding it - take control of the German Afrika Korps Expeditionary Force under the command of General Erwin Rommel. In this many hours of experience, the offensive is paramount - we move forward, once repulsing British troops from Ajdabiya, another time protecting the Rommel tank, and finally taking part in the battles of Gazal and Tobruk. Since the armored divisions play a key role here, we must skillfully tune the vehicles and repair them in time (I will explain the significance of both in a minute).
Although the operation in North Africa is very intense, and the roar of tank fire and clouds of dust rising from their tracks are completely boring, this is just an appetizer - or dessert - for the main course. "Companies of Heroes 3", which is the Italian Allied campaign of 1943. Within its framework, we conduct operations on the entire front, and not just in individual battles. (Which, however, is missing).
This takes place on the huge tactical map of Italy, which we access after the occupation of Sicily. Then, using the navy, we move our first company to the Continent and establish ourselves in Salerno. From here comes to direct the offensive, the purpose of which is to capture Rome. However, we must create the road to the Eternal City ourselves.
This solution seems to be borrowed from 4X strategies - even from Paradox - because we play on the tactical map in turn. At first contact with Company of Heroes 3 I did not like it; I got the impression that the creators wanted to artificially extend the campaign this way. However, as the story progressed, I began to appreciate it, so that in the end I could not imagine CoH3 without this element.
Initially, our actions on the tactical map are reduced only to moving units with a specific goal. The direction is given by Generals Bakram and Norton (later also commanders of the guerrillas, Eleanor Valenti), each according to his own convictions. Following Bakram's advice, we will get to Rome a little faster, but we will not secure the rear. If we listen to Norton, we will occupy Italy step by step, without fear that we will have to fight on several fronts and join forces with the allies as quickly as possible.
The main thing is that this choice is influenced not only by cosmetics or the duration of the game. Dear commander will reward our loyalty with unique bonusessuch as anti-aircraft support, civilian intelligence, or amphibious access. Their trees can be seen at the beginning of the adventure, allowing you to customize the story choices to suit your own play style. In addition, on the tactical map we create new companies, shoot at the cities that we want to occupy - there is information over individual settlements whether it will be necessary to carry out a mission for this purpose or not (if so, we will see the consequences of the bombing close) - we conduct reconnaissance with the Air Force, and...
… We take on side quests. Some of them are less important and some of them are more important. Suffice it to say that during one of them we come across the already mentioned Eleonora Valenti. It is possible that if in this case I had followed the advice of General Bakram, I would not have received the support of local partisans at all (if the creators had not foreseen another possibility of establishing cooperation with them). This is what finally convinced me to play this relatively simple game on a tactical map in Company of Heroes 3. The available maneuvers and solutions provide so many more or less different scenarios - perhaps different in detail, but still - that I was delighted with the very idea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbthe "replay value" of the Italian campaign.
Controlled chaos
As I wrote at the beginning of the review, in the gameplay as such when it comes to fulfilling the mission, Company of Heroes 3 almost completely resembles a "two". The most important difference between the two names is the most important of the changes made to CoH3, i.e. active pause. Oh how I missed her in the previous part of the series! Fast snapping has never been my forte, so even if I came up with some interesting tactic, I usually couldn't implement it and had to resort to simpler maneuvers.
In the "troika" it was not a problem. After pressing the spacebar, the action on the screen froze, and I was able to look at the battlefield and give orders. It is important to note that Relic Entertainment decided not to complicate the life of the players, for example, the Polish studio Destructive Creations in Was Mongrels, thanks to which in active pause mode of one unit, we can issue a number of commands, not just one. It's hard to find a better implementation of this feature. This can be especially appreciated in missions where we have limited time to prepare defenses. Moreover, we are able to queue literally all actions, including such trivial ones as lifting an anti-tank gun lying nearby and returning it to position. Needless to say, when the game resumes, all units begin to perform their assigned tasks at the same time. Beautiful thing!
However, active pause Company of Heroes 3 no longer the same. The creators also made a number of small changes, the vast majority of which I really liked. Anti-tank guns or howitzers can be towed by trucks. The infantry unit is able to climb on top of the tank to get to the battlefield faster. The terrain plays a huge role in the later missions of the Italian campaign. The base expands without the participation of engineers - we just choose the right building, and in its menu the one we want to build. With the fully optional auto-resupply feature, units that have suffered casualties spontaneously retreat to even out the lineup. This is important, because along with the experience gained, our soldiers reach the status of a veteran, opening up access to additional teams. By enabling automatic replenishment, we minimize the chance of losing such a unit.
I especially liked two of these micromechanics. The first allows you to place branches in buildings without the certainty that they will be able to leave them. If such a structure is destroyed, the soldiers are likely to be buried under its rubble. This is interesting because the objects that we encounter are sometimes already heavily devastated (because, for example, we bombed a given city with the help of the navy from the level of the tactical map). By using them as a cover, we are taking a lot of risks, which some people may comment that they are falling into a death trap. If we don't watch them and evacuate them at the right time, we'll have to say goodbye to them.
The second mechanic, which made a special impression on me, is even simpler in its assumptions. She takes advantage of what tanks - as in reality - have weaker armor on the sides and back. If you want to destroy them effectively, it's worth aiming at these points. And vice versa - trying to keep your own armored division alive, you should pay attention to how your vehicles are positioned in relation to enemy units. While a quick turn of the tank can be a little tricky, the active pause mode comes in handy. Its use saves a lot of labor for engineers repairing damaged vehicles. This is especially useful during the struggle in North Africa, where we basically control these powerful "iron beasts" non-stop.
Tanks also suffer from the biggest mechanical flaw Company of Heroes 3. Namely, they cannot run into infantry. Shoot her? Yes. Rubbing into the ground with its mass? Why! This is all the more strange because in the "two" such a maneuver was in the order of things (in the "one" too, if I remember correctly). In fact, you can even say that the players liked this mechanic. IN CoH3 I miss him very much. While I understand what that would look like on the pros and cons list for people who won't be reading the text, but damn it, I couldn't look at these "people" running in front of my tank tanks as if nothing had happened.
So, on the one hand, Relic Entertainment added many new mechanics, which increased the realism Company of Heroes 3, and on the other hand, it took away the credibility of the game a little thanks to these kind of strange decisions. What's worse, I can't find an explanation for it. I do not think that the developer is afraid that he will exaggerate with the scale of violence and creepiness.
War in the colors of the Mediterranean
In general, I avoid writing about graphics in reviews, commenting on it in one or two sentences at best. I think the screenshots, trailers and gameplay that you can find on the internet are worth more than a thousand words. Therefore, I would have produced in vain. In this case, because of the criticism that fell on Company of Heroes 3 before the premiere - I decided to make an exception.
From a purely technical point of view, it is difficult to reproach anything in the visual setting. For a strategy game, this is really nice - especially since the review version fixes many of the visual issues that have kept the community up at night in recent months. However, not all.
Some infantry units still resemble cartoon characters, and vehicles are their toy counterparts. It doesn't really matter much in the heat of battle, but when we pause the game and zoom in, there are strange artistic choices at first glance. My eyes quickly faded, but I expect die-hard fans of previous installments in the series, or militaria in general, to be disgusted for a much longer time.
Thankfully, the character portraits, including the aforementioned Generals Buckram and Norton, that you may have seen in preview footage, have been replaced with new ones. They're still a bit cartoonish, but at least they don't bite into the style of the whole, and - I have the impression - reflect the characters of both soldiers well. Explosions also look much better. If a thrown grenade hits a near-death, fleeing enemy unit perfectly, its surviving members will fly into the air with a crack, then disappear in a cloud of black smoke mixed with blood spatter. A truly eerie sight, but if such action "enters" us, it's hard not to purr with satisfaction.
In general, the animations are impressive, although some important details have been omitted. Sometimes you can't see, for example, shells loaded into cannons. This is all the more surprising that such details were not stingy before. Perhaps in the case of Company of Heroes 3 the creators decided to focus on other nuances, because, for example, the tracks left by tanks or post-explosion funnels look phenomenal, and the destruction of the environment is breathtaking.
Overall visual effects CoH3 difficult to evaluate unambiguously - they are undoubtedly at a high level, but their performance is a little uneven, and the style adopted by the developer will certainly divide the players. For me, despite the shortcomings I noted, they did not take away the pleasure of communicating with the game, because I was more often delighted with what I looked at than annoyed. However, many graphical details could be improved. Maybe the creators will succumb to the pressure of community voices and indulge them a little in post-release "patches"? See.
However, I dare say that this kind of change will not see a soundtrack that also turns out uneven. The English dub is great, both in story cutscenes and on the battlefield. Soldiers who do not spare the ears of the curse sound much more believable than those from the "two". Explosions also fall decently. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for vehicles, which are sometimes barely audible in the ever-present turmoil. The music, on the other hand, is good, although it doesn't stand out - a male choir from CoH2singing in Russian provided a much more memorable artistic experience.
The technical side of the war
However, I will end my complaints here because technically, I have nothing to criticize Company of Heroes 3. Admittedly, I encountered a few minor bugs and crashes, but none of them resulted in major problems. The most serious - and probably the most ridiculous - bug was caused by an enemy tank, which, after breaking through my (intentionally) modest defense, invaded the remains of a destroyed fence and ... He began to ride them back and forth, back and forth. Best of all, he didn't try to shoot at my units at all. They were already done with it, but they couldn't even scratch it. After a long time, the vehicle unlocked and drove on.
Perhaps this is a derivative of a slightly unfinished pathfinding system, which also limped on the "deuce". However, such situations do not happen often enough to blame for not so extensive production. Moreover, the creators went into the hands of the players and - probably for the first time in the series - allowed them to freely customize keyboard shortcuts.
I will also note that I originally intended to write some harsh words about the rather long load and write times, but this problem was largely solved by an update released during the period when I tested CoH3. Also should have been too extensive interface, but in the end I decided that none of its elements were redundant. Another thing is that sometimes they overlap, and some of them were not intuitively hidden in the depth of the menu.
However, I do not want to cling to trifles, because in terms of optimization Company of Heroes 3 doesn't disappoint either - and this, unfortunately, is not the standard in our time. I tested the game on two hardware configurations - a weaker one equipped with an Intel Core i5-3350P processor, 8 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card, and a more powerful one with an Intel Core i5-12400F processor, 32 GB of RAM and a GeForce RTX 3070 card on board. In the case of the first on "ultra" settings, there were drops to 50 FPS, but when it came to the second, I did not notice a single one - the game was running at about 80 frames per second all the time.
CoH for the third time - sold!
To sum it up, Relic Entertainment once again did not disappoint, delivering exquisite production, yet huge at the same time, like never before. Two story campaigns - one for a dozen or so hours, the other for several tens of hours - and four factions of diverse gameplay (USA, UK, Wehrmacht and Afrika Korps) will allow even people who avoid online games spend 3 hundreds of hours с Company of Heroes. And while the developer has made some strange - or just plain wrong - design decisions, it's hard to deny him the artistry and title of RTS master.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Although I've been playing more turn-based strategy games than RTS lately, my interest in World War II meant that I watched both the first and second installments of the series at the time of the premiere. "Company of Heroes". Later, however, I did not return to them. I spent a total of almost fifty hours with "troika", which allowed me to finish both campaigns on "normal" (Italian is a bit short because the time was pressing), which was a fitting challenge for me.
Continuation of the historical strategy in real time. The events of the third part unfold in the Mediterranean. The game has an exciting story campaign, the largest in the history of the Company of Heroes series. Battles with the enemy take place surrounded by picturesque Italian mountain passes, coastal landscapes and vast African deserts. In addition to the tasks themselves, the game has a tactical map, as in the games of the Total War series.
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