Company of Heroes 3

[Darren S]

.....and there goes a few hundred hours of my life to this, no doubt. Absolutely, superb news!

Company of Heroes 3 is coming next year, but you can play a demo right now

Embraces a Total War-style structure and boasts a completely overhauled destruction system.

www.pcgamer.com

Will be interesting how the Italian looking backdrop will pan out. I'd previously hoped that if CoH3 was ever in the pipeline, that they would look into the Pacific Theatre of WW2. I guess with the dense jungle and tree canopies of the islands and places like the Philippines and Burma - that wouldn't really translate well into an RTS?

Regardless - really looking forward to this. One of the few titles that I'll pre-order - I have that much faith in it!

 

[Darren S]

Got the pre-alpha assigned to my Steam account. Will be giving it a go later.

 

[Darren S]

First impressions of CoH3 are very good. They've done a hybridised view of the Total War enlarged map, that pairs up with the battle view familiar to the CoH type of play.

Graphically, it chugs a bit - but it is pre-alpha. I've maxed everything and its either not optimised well or the fact that it simply is in the PA stage. Could also be that my GTX1080 struggles now? More so that they say the PA version doesn't natively support anything higher than 1920x1080 yet. It does recommend setting the monitor to match that - so I'll give that a go from 2560x1440 - see if that improves it.

The destructive environments are great - from sandbags and boxes to fuel tanks, walls, etc. The interface is instantly CoH, but with a few tweaks. Strange UI interaction where pushing the mouse to the edge of the screen takes far too long to scroll the view in that direction. Could be a slider for that or alternatively, I'll just use arrow keys.

Probably the only negative I've come across and hopefully it was just a set-piece within the mission, was the stealing of a Wirbelwind AA tank from the side of an airfield. I couldn't occupy it until I'd cleared out the enemies within the immediate area. As the enemies there were infantry and one light armour vehicle - they are exactly the type of opposition that are weak against it. It was always a great game mechanic too to swoop in with some engineers or infantry and nab an abandoned vehicle in the previous games.

 

[Darren S]

Well, today is officially release day and so far, so good. I very (very) rarely play a game on launch date as invariably there are issues galore. However, I've only come across one so far - where for about a minute, the game stuttered for a couple of seconds regularly. Then it simply stopped being a dick and carried on as normal.

It definitely has the familiar CoH vibe and feel. Some unique branches of military forces have already cropped up - the UK Indian Artillery being the first I've seen. These make for a welcome change over the usual US Airbourne and the like and aren't usually represented in many games.

Will definitely be playing the campaign through - as I did several times with the previous two titles. Genuinely intrigued to see what they will come up with in the inevitable DLC packs.

I'll add some more screenshots as I progress.

 

[Cookie]

Awesome! Look forward to playing it when I have some time in 2025

 

[Darren S]

Liking this - it's got some subtle differences (improvements even) over the previous titles. The map control phase is quite well done also - takes a bit of getting used to, but definitely plays a role on how successful you'll be when the next combat phase starts.

Aside from that, I'm really surprised at how few Steam achievements there are. CoH2 had 452. So far, CoH3 only appears to have 24?

 

[Darren S]

TLDR - if you liked either CoH1 or CoH2 - definitely buy this.


So, just over a month into it and I have completed the main Italian dynamic campaign and have started on the storyline/linear North Africa campaign. I'd argue that I'm actually preferring the North African campaign at the minute - despite its one-tracked progress.

For me, it's been very enjoyable - Relic yet again showing map design genius on some of the levels where they reward you putting some thought into the next steps of your troops. I'd argue that the unlock nature of buffs and abilities for experienced units may alter the battles a bit too much. When you start with a basic and unskilled unit, their abilities are very limited and you rely heavily on scavenging weapons and repairing the few armour units that you might be entitled to. If you keep that unit alive and spend points earned by them on further unlocks and upgrades, then they become very powerful. A case in point was on one of the last missions playing as US Airbourne, where against a revealed German target, I called in an battleship bombardment, a P-47 rocket strike and a Mitchell bomber run. - all at the same time. As expected, this absolutely decimated the German units in the target area and I merely had to mop up the few stragglers that were left.

There's a fair amount of toxic comments on the Steam discussions relating to CoH3 - the majority of which I don't really think are justified. Both previous titles required additional DLCs and patches to be made before attaining the worthy status that they have achieved. If CoH3 follows the same path in terms of maturing with additional development, then it's going to be just as good, if not better than either of those games.