Hands on with Company of Heroes 3 - Preview

Over the years I have had a very casual relationship with the Company of Heroes series, I have enjoyed the games, but they are not my go to. After replaying the first game when it was recently ported to mobile devices, I remembered why I did enjoy playing the series. Later that year Company of Heroes 3 was announced and while it has taken a while, the games release date is now within sight, and Sega and developer Relic were kind enough to give me access to the game, to put it through its paces.

The first thing that you should know about the game is there are a few modes, there is the usual multiplayer suite that the series is known for and while it was available in the build I had, the official times were in the middle of the night for me, so I opted to sleep instead. As for the single player campaign, well there are two this time the one that takes place in North Africa is in line with the general flow of past titles, but the one that is set in Italy, that one is quite a bit different. As the Italy campaign was the new one, that is where I spent my time and I am glad I did. When you are in battles they mostly play out the same as they had in the past, you move your units, attack others or capture points, rinse and repeat. I know that is a basic description of the gameplay, but I want to focus on what is new and for that we start with the tactical pause.

In a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone the tactical pause, lets you pause the game, but unlike accessing the actual pause menu, this one lets you move around the map. Moving around the map is cool, as it lets you get an idea of where things are, but where the tactical pause shines is that you can then give commands to your units. So if you are in the middle of a fight and need to split your forces up, one to draw enemy fire and one to flank, you can try to do so in real time, or you can use the tactical pause to give the commands. Once the tactical pause is lifted, all the actions will play out meaning that your units will go in the directions you chose. As you can also stack commands on a unit, you can have them do a fair number of things in a row, it really is quite a powerful option and perfect for those players, who like me, may not be the ultimate tactical player. There are only a finite number of moves that you can call upon, so don’t think you can stack 40 moves in the queue and let the game auto-play. Once items have been completed, you can then head back in and start to add more, should you need it, so it does have some versatility.

The other new aspect for the Italy campaign is the new campaign map, rather than selecting a mission from it, instead you have free control to move around the map. What this does is allows for you to make decisions, heading up the coast might keep you on a road, meaning you can get around faster, but it might give the enemy more time to regroup. The best thing I can compare this to is Advance Wars, you can only see so far ahead at anyone time, you can capture towns and bases to get more resources and when you encounter an enemy force, you can jump into battles. These battles are dependent on two things, the unit you were controlling at the time and the place where you met, as both will shake things up. There was a time when I was using my infantry to scout ahead, while my tank went up the coast, but then my infantry discovered a machine gun nest and all hell broke loose. The game understands that not every player will want to join in every fight, so for those smaller skirmishes, you can actually just simulate the battle. That is not to say you don’t have to fight, because if you want to, you can and then the game transitions back to the regular CoH gameplay. There are also some battles on the map that are mandatory, but those are story driven, so it makes sense you have to play those.

While I only had the game for a few days, I was able to put a good chunk of time into it, so much so that I accidentally played past where I should have, but I just couldn’t stop. With the game taking a few extra months to polish things up some more, in should launch in a perfect state. I will say though that apart from some cutscenes that I was told were not final, I really didn’t notice anything visually wrong with the game. As a preview build there were some load time complaints, but again the game is going through its final polish phases, those should be smoothed out.

Series fans will likely find more nuanced changes than I did, but even with my limited knowledge, I can say that I had fun playing the game, so much so I played more than I should have. Will these new tactical options bring more people into the game, who knows, they do allow for more of a slower paced gameplay style, which helped me out. There are still a few months until the game is released, so for now we wait, but once that wait is over, a rich tactical game will be waiting and that is a good thing.