Developer Relic Entertainment has created an admirable port for the Console Edition of Company of Heroes 3, which in spite of a rather intuitive control scheme tailor-made for controller, doesn’t quite feel at home away from the mouse-and-keyboard it was originally designed for. Relic previously brought Age of Empires 4 to consoles in tandem with the Xbox Game Studio founded to head the brand’s real-time strategy game efforts, World’s Edge. As a second effort in converting the PC-centric RTS genre to a console experience, Company of Heroes 3 is more than functional, and while the game itself has both ambition and depth, the Console Edition never quite manages to shake the feeling that it’s on the wrong platform.
Those familiar with the Company of Heroes series (or even RTS games in general) will feel right at home in the series’ third outing. For beginners, the game’s campaigns do an effective job easing the player into its many systems, but it will be largely up to the individual to explore the intricacies of each unit under their command. Company of Heroes 3 deftly balances its World War 2 setting on both a minute and grand scale, offering two separate single-player campaign experiences, customizable instant action skirmishes, online multiplayer, and co-op against AI opponents. Frequently satisfying and oftentimes tense gameplay is littered throughout Company of Heroes 3 on console, and while it feels as though few concessions were made on a technical level, it remains clear that – at least for now – PC remains the optimum domain for the RTS genre.
The latter is the more traditional RTS campaign experience, leaning on the infamous reputation of the Nazis’ Afrika Korps commander, Erwin Rommel, to deliver a rather straightforward sequence of missions with interspersed cutscenes. The story makes a concerted and applaudable effort to push the wartime plight of Benghazi locals to the forefront, but this at times feels disconnected from the missions themselves, which often feature the Desert Fox himself leading the destruction wrought by his armored divisions.
The campaign depicting the Italian front is the much more mechanically interesting option in Company of Heroes 3. While historiographers may balk at the agency provided to players in executing the Allied invasion of Italy, it’s a more ambitious, grandiose, and varied experience. One half of the Italian campaign has the player commanding Allied companies on a macro scale – a map of occupied Italy is shrouded by the genre’s staple fog of war, with infantry, aircraft, artillery, armor, and naval vessels maneuvered as the player sees fit in an effort to liberate towns, cities, and ports from the Wehrmacht. The turn-based overview of the Italian campaign then leads dynamically into classic Company of Heroes missions and skirmishes, which constitute the campaign’s other half.
The increased interactivity with the war at large in Company of Heroes 3’s Italian campaign does not, however, extend to…
2023-06-05 09:30:05
Source from screenrant.com