Gaming News Company of Heroes 3: More than just a sequel to this cult series of strategy games, all new features
In just two episodes and a handful of expansions, the Company of Heroes saga has established itself as a safe bet in strategy gaming. After a well-deserved vacation, Relic Entertainment and Sega are back on the front lines for a Company of Heroes 3 that’s more ambitious than ever. The liberation of Europe is at stake!
Summary
- Return of the Heroes
- The Mediterranean Front
- A total war
Return of the Heroes
Announced in July 2021 via a trailer that had a small impact on strategists, Company of Heroes 3 finally drops its troops onto PC land on February 23, 2023. Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 owners will have to be patient (only a 2023 wave is on the cards). Unsurprisingly, this third episode of the famous STR (for Real Time Strategy) saga is being developed by Relic Entertainment (Age of Empires IV, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III) on behalf of the Japanese publisher SEGA.
The studios, old masters in the Art of Videogame War, want above all to bring the license back to “human level” and offer the most successful “Company of Heroes” experience possible. The creative teams can rely on a brand new, specially developed game engine – the Essence Engine 5 – which, among other things, offers more and more details and a desired “more realistic” destruction system. If the successive postponements have saddened fans of the franchise and strategy game (COH 3 was originally slated for 2022), their patience has been rewarded. As a matter of fact, Company of Heroes 3 posted a respectable 81% on Metacritic for the PC version.
The Mediterranean Front
The first two episodes of the Company of Heroes saga, as well as its expansions, focus on the western fronts (Battle of Normandy and Operation Cobra) and then on the eastern fronts. This third iteration radically changes the atmosphere, placing its military theater around the Mediterranean Sea. The two solo campaigns dreamed up by Relic Entertainment’s screenwriters now focus on the conflicts that have engulfed North Africa (Libia, Egypt) and southern Italy. The North Africa campaign puts you in command for the first time in the history of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps series, while the Italy campaign sits alongside British and North American forces under the command of Eisenhower and Montgomery.
A total war
The main novelty, which isn’t really one, is on the side of the actual structure of the single-player campaigns, which inherit a feature introduced in the Company of Heroes 2 expansion “Ardennes Assault”. The saga takes a “Total War” round in 2023, commemorating the final boss of the wargame… Total War by Creative Assembly Studios. With Company of Heroes 3, Relic Entertainment dusts off the concept of a dynamic campaign map whose main objective is to create a natural connection between two very different types of sequences: “real-time” battles and the strategic management of troops and front-to-front turn by turn .
The studios are trying to expose the strategists to an ever-increasing and, of course, tactical conflict. Decisions made now have long-term consequences that affect both the progress of the current mission and the campaign as a whole. The dynamic map allows you to position your troops ahead of a battle (or ambush), call in reinforcements, call in air and/or naval support, and set up critical supply chains to support the war effort. Among the other novelties, it is worth highlighting the “partisans”, capable of weakening the enemy in occupied territories, and the total tactical break, which, as the name suggests, allows you to take time to think in the middle of ‘a battle.
With its four playable factions (American, British, Wehrmacht and Afrika Korps) as well as the points mentioned above, Company of Heroes 3 presents itself as the most ambitious installment in the series, even if the other modes offered do not revolutionize the genre in any way. “Skirmish” mode invites 2 to 4 players to work together to defeat a particularly inspired artificial intelligence (or AI). In multiplayer, 2 to 8 players in 1v1, 2v2, 3.3 or 4v4 compete in real-time battles consisting of conquering points on the map to harvest resources and thus dominate enemy forces. Classic but effective!
