For greater convenience, toggle on automatic unit reinforcement, and the series becomes a truer rendition of real-time tactics. For starters, I adore the automation of typical base-building ‘macro’ elements, which frees up mental resources for focusing on unit management (aka ‘micro’). It's a shame because there’s a great game with some franchise-progressing ideas at play here. Given Relic’s history with the series, it’s reasonable to expect the more distracting bugs will be polished out. While I only had a single crash in my 31 hours with Company of Heroes 3, I hope the day-zero patch fixes a lot of the issues I had. From T-posing unit models and clipping issues, through to more game-breaking ones like a map that refused to end after victory (reloading a manual save didn’t help) through to a single town in my Italian campaign that the game wouldn’t let me capture for any apparent reason. It doesn’t help that I encountered a wealth of bugs in my playing time. And then there’s the frustrating reality that there’s no option to load manual saves from the game’s main menu, forcing you to resume the game’s last auto-save, sit through unskippable cutscenes until it finally lets you open a menu to load your last save. While Company of Heroes 3 happily lets you save-scum your way to success, more saves equals slower saving times. But when I realised it was too easy, I was miffed that there wasn’t an option to up the difficulty mid-campaign. As a Company of Heroes veteran, I was wary of harder difficulties adding more time to a lengthy Italian campaign. It took me about 25 hours to knock over the Italian campaign on standard difficulty-the default and lowest available difficulty-and around six hours to beat the more traditional RTS North African campaign on the next highest difficulty. And the North African campaign is a typical real-time strategy (RTS) affair. Beyond this, the Italian campaign has a Total War-lite mix of turn-based macro strategy spliced with typical boots-on-the-ground Company of Heroes real-time battles. Given the locational breadth of the war, developer Relic Entertainment has managed to make a series of games and expansions that have their own identity, despite never shifting away from retaining Germany as a persistent opposing faction.Ĭompany of Heroes 3 mixes things up by offering two distinct campaigns: one in Italy and the other in North Africa.

While Call of Duty and Battlefield have been happy to shift from the trenches of World War II, I love that the Company of Heroes franchise has stuck to its bolt-action guns and remained in the era.

Company of heroes 3 italian faction