Company of Heroes 3 Reviews
Outfoxing your human foes remains excellent in Relic's latest, Company of Heroes 3. The heart of this World War 2 RTS' combat and faction design is stronger than ever.
Company of Heroes 3's single-player campaigns remix the series' signature WW2 combat, but they wrap it up in a boring, buggy strategic map and a mismatched story.
Company of Heroes 3 is a spectacular RTS that manages to shine even when the main campaign doesn't.
Navigating a tonal minefield with just enough confidence, Company of Heroes 3 is a big, refined, and beautifully textured addition to an already brilliant series.
I’m a sucker for studios that don’t play things safe. IO Interactive kept toying with the Hitman formula until the very end, Supergiant reinvents itself with every new release, and there’s not a genre that Thunderful won’t touch. With Company of Heroes 3, Relic could have easily taken the safe route — or, to put it in Sid Meier-speak, ignored the “completely new” and “improved” pillars of sequel design in favor of something familiar. Instead, it looked outward, recognized what made the best modern strategy games tick, and adopted those factors into its own formula. Company of Heroes 3 is a great sequel, yes. But it’s also just an excellent game.
It may have taken 17 years and one disappointing sequel along the way, but Relic are to be commended here for somehow managing to take tactical perfection and redefining it not just for old veterans, but for a whole new generation of armchair generals as well.
Relic has taken everything that makes the first two games great and made sufficient additions to help Company of Heroes 3 succeed in this renaissance of RTS titles.
After ten years away, Company Of Heroes 3 returns with two stonkingly good single-player campaigns and a bevy of multiplayer options. Its enormous Italian operation could have more tension in the way you conquer the map, but its RTS battles remain as compelling as ever, and the sheer breadth and variety on offer here will please new and veteran players alike.
As I noted in an earlier preview, whether I was fighting against humans or the computer AI, I never got the sense that war was too easy and my opponent was too easy to be. And so there was always a cost to fighting, and that’s the way it should be.
Company of Heroes 3 - Console Edition is a mostly competent port of a very good tactical WWII game, but it still feels like it very much belongs on PC.
It's hardly an original setting or concept, but Company of Heroes 3 makes up for it with sheer charm and playability.
Company of Heroes 3 lives up to the reputation of both its development studio and the franchise. An ambitious RTS that is not satisfied with following the line established by its predecessors and that arrives loaded with substantial novelties. A candy for fans of the genre and a must for fans of the saga.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
The real-time battles are better than ever but rather than being a highlight the main story campaign is a peculiarly dull experience, that exposes the lack of genuinely new ideas.
A very convincing return for one of Relic's more iconic series, that keeps the best features of the previous games while also bringing fresh new ideas that change the way players can play and enjoy Company of Heroes. Will it be the best strategy game of 2023? Only time will tell.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Company of Heroes 3 is a splendid and rewarding RTS game. Tense battles, brilliant map design, and streamlined unit management make it easily one of the best in the genre, with the Italian campaign acting as an exciting blueprint for the series’ future. If Relic wants to use Company of Heroes to tell serious and significant stories, though, the team needs to commit to actually doing that beyond just giving them a surface treatment.
The core gameplay of Company of Heroes has never felt better, and there are hours upon hours of fun to be had simply blasting your way through other players or teaming up against AI opponents. The dual campaigns are honestly a bit of a letdown, but I’m hopeful things could be streamlined or improved with future patches and updates. The RTS genre has undoubtedly been in a slump over the last decade, but Company of Heroes 3 might be just the shot in the arm it needs to keep going.
The most unfortunate aspect of Company of Heroes 3 Console Edition is the text size, an issue with no solution. The settings have an option to increase cutscene subtitle size, but the same is not available for the many, many text boxes in-game. It frequently makes for a frustrating experience when playing from a couch, and is a constant reminder that Company of Heroes 3 is first and foremost a game built for PC; it's perfectly playable and more than enjoyable on console, but is still often cumbersome and awkward.
For anyone familiar with the series (and the RTS genre itself), Company of Heroes 3 is a solid but flawed entry. For newcomers, getting to grips with the controls and trudging through the patchy Italian campaign might not be worth the price of enlistment. However, if you do learn its intricacies, you're rewarded with fantastic, intense combat. It's a great effort to translate the RTS to console even with one or two issues.
Though Company of Heroes 3 might lack some polish and its implementation of a console-friendly control system takes a good while to get used to, Relic Entertainment has nonetheless crafted a layered World War II RTS that combines meaningful tactical choices and consequences with compelling street-level strategy that just begs to be revisited time and again. Armchair generals should rejoice.
Given the excellence of the two earlier games, I wasn’t surprised that Company of Heroes 3 won me over once again. The addition of Total War-style campaign layer adds a little variety without being overwhelming. Even without it, though, the battles are still endlessly fun, chaotic, and challenging. Skirmishes and the Essence Editor will keep players busy until the next entry in the series. Company of Heroes 3 reminds us that there’s still a lot of joy to be found in the best real-time strategy games.