This walkthrough from the developers shows the multiple approaches you can take to complete one of the game’s best missions

The dynamic campaign gives you two types of real-time battles. The first are generated for you on the fly, both sides spawned into a random map with a random set of objectives. Like the game’s traditional skirmish mode, but in the middle of a campaign. These can sometimes be a little easy, but they’re still a blast—I played skirmishes in the original game for years after I’d rinsed its campaigns—and so every chance I got to play one of these side missions I did, which I definitely cannot say about Total War.

The other type are the scripted missions, the meat of the campaign, the ones focused on important historical events. Think the Anzio landings, or Monte Cassino (where, if you’re fast enough, you can change history and capture it before it gets bombed into dust). It’s here, on big maps with varying terrain and shifting objectives, that Company of Heroes 3 really shines.

The hills, the stairs, the buildings, Italy’s towns and villages are a perfect setting for Company of Heroes’ puzzle-like gameplay
The hills, the stairs, the buildings, Italy’s towns and villages are a perfect setting for Company of Heroes’ puzzle-like gameplay
Image: Relic

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN

I can dismiss the campaign map’s problems because every second I wasn’t battling with its wonkiness, and was instead at ground-level commanding my troops on the field, I was in heaven. I couldn’t wait to start another RTS battle, then fight another one, and another. Company of Heroes 3's tactical showdowns might be even better than the original’s, as while the first game flourished in the Normandy countryside, the decision to move the action to the Mediterranean has proved a masterstroke. In Italy the series has found an even better match between setting and gameplay.

Company of Heroes 2 always felt weird because it was trying to be an intimate strategy game on the broadest, busiest battlefield in human history. Shifting the spotlight to Italy has proven an inspiring choice. That front wasn’t settled with cataclysmic tank battles and enormous advances. It was a dogfight, a methodical slog up the peninsula, with mountainous terrain and dense urban centres the perfect platform for a German defence that had to be unseated using the full weight of the Allies’ combined arms operations.

This is what I mean when I talk about the combination of challenging terrain, dense urban centres and combined arms. The isolated challenges highlighted here play out across the game, in every mission, over dozens of hours.

That’s exactly how Relic has always wanted you to play Company of Heroes. Not by rushing, but taking your time and using every weapon at your disposal at the exact moment it’s needed. Inching your way towards Rome (the campaign’s final objective) involves fighting a series of major battles that play out as a succession of fascinating little challenges. You move some infantry to cover, then you flank with other infantry, and ah, now use a tank, then some artillery support, and everything working together manages to clear half a street. You’re playing chess, only the pieces have chipper little accents.

There are missions in this game that ask you to move from town to village on the same map, each settlement built upon wildly varying levels of terrain, with stone walls and staircases and old churches and crooked little streets. The defenders are dug in so well, and the tools at my disposal were so vast, that I honestly don’t think I’ve enjoyed an RTS challenge more in my life. The genre’s tired “rock paper scissors” engagement rules go out the window here when you have to overcome an MG nest, sniper, anti-tank gun and infantry bunker all at the same time, and all in the same town square.

Is it innovative in a tactical sense? After all, it’s been 17 years since the first game. And the answer is, not really. It didn’t have to be! The units and tactics at your disposal are very similar to those from the original game, so it’s not like Relic went and reinvented the wheel when it came to the series’ core gameplay. And why would they? Like I’ve said repeatedly, it was already perfect. Now we just get that perfection served up more often in a more scenic location, in more varied and interesting ways.

The game’s other singleplayer campaign, set in North Africa, is an odd thing. The game didn’t need it for longevity’s sake, since the Italian campaign is huge and can be replayed. It’s narrated through the perspective of Libyan Jews but has you playing as the Germans, quipping jaunty little one-liners as you blast your way through the desert. And its missions are stingier, and nowhere near as memorable as the Italian campaign’s centrepiece battles. I’m not really sure why it exists! It does feature Australians though, which is nice.

I cannot believe I had doubts about this game. Sure, the dynamic campaign is a broken mess, but the fact I can so easily overlook one of the game’s central pillars shows just how strong the others—mostly its RTS engagements—are. On the battlefield itself this is still Company of Heroes, as good as it ever was and in some ways, even better.

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.

“You made another very, very good Company of Heroes game, congratulations chaps”
“You made another very, very good Company of Heroes game, congratulations chaps”
Image: Relic