The Company of Heroes series has held a prominent spot, both in the real-time strategy genre and my memory. The first game of the series hit the genre like a bomb, with its slick incorporation of cover mechanics and gameplay that wasn't quite like anything else. The sequel didn't break what wasn't broken, delivering more content alongside a few new features and more polish. After the release of Company of Heroes 2, the series was cemented in a spot of high regard.

Company of Heroes 3 is the first time that the series has made any truly significant missteps, and there's a shocking amount of them. From a dynamic campaign with game-breaking bugs to nonsensical UI decisions and horrid balance, it is hard to believe that the game is in the same series as the others. At launch, the game was in such a poor state that it could've been mistaken as an Early Access release. Some issues have been patched since, but a striking amount remain.

One of the marquee features introduced in Company of Heroes 3 is the dynamic campaign. This mode strings together real-time skirmishes against the AI with an overall campaign map of southern Italy, where you control deployments of Allied units. The map is split up into zones, with each zone having a city within it. These cities are the strongpoint of the zone, and capturing it captures the zone itself, but some cities have additional benefits. Ones that contain an airfield allow you to stage aircraft to scout or bomb targets in the campaign map, and they also enable the use of that air support in any RTS skirmishes within range of that airport. Port cities allow you to request ships, which similarly can be used to either bombard enemy positions on the map or use that some capability within a skirmish.

Think of it as if the Total War franchise decided to make a game set in World War II but without the same level of depth, and you aren't too far off. Unit deployments are of a single type, not unlike how you choose a faction in a multiplayer skirmish, but it isn't as though you're making an "army" based on custom mixes of individual squads or units. If you use a deployment to attack an enemy unit on the campaign map or a city controlled by the German forces, you can auto-resolve the fight. However, manually fighting it in the traditional RTS way generally means the unit takes less damage and you gain other benefits.

The first issue with the dynamic campaign is in how rigid and static it is. In the early parts, you feel like you barely have enough units to cover the handful of zones you have, lest you leave a backwater zone open to German counterattack. However, the Germans rarely attack except for in some pre-determined areas, and even in those, it is rarely with any intensity. You'll see a single deployment headed toward you, or staged in a German town, and after bombing or bombarding the enemy, it's trivial to use a deployment of your own to mop up the rest.

The mode has plenty of bugs, including a game-ending one that prevents further progress in the campaign. At one point, I used a deployment to take a city that is also key to progression in the campaign. The battle was hard-fought, but I managed to make it through … only to have the campaign victory screen soft-lock the game. Given that the game only saves in between turns, I was destined to have to replay that difficult mission. This yielded its own set of problems.

You see, the RTS balance within Company of Heroes 3 is all over the place. For the most part, and similar to the AI's behavior within the structure of the campaign map, the AI is practically passive. For most maps, there's a sparse number of enemy units that the AI throws at you to attack or keep zones closer to their base. My own base wasn't attacked once in the entire time I spent with the campaign, to the point that I learned that building any defenses there was an outright waste. Most skirmishes are little more than, "create enough units to overcome the weak pressure the AI puts on you."

That is, except for this maddening mission. The reason it was such a pain to complete wasn't due to its length or by any normal measurement of overall difficulty, but due to a single Panther tank that was unusually resistant to most anti-tank weapons. While anti-tank grenades normally do significant damage to armor and are the reason you don't want to let your armor get engaged at close range by infantry, this tank shrugged off grenade after grenade. With each grenade costing valuable resources and each squad's usage of one coming with a lengthy cooldown, I had to change my entire approach to the mission due to the boss-fight nature of this single Panther tank. For a series that seems to take pride in some degree of realism, it's rather silly to watch a single tank shrug off the better part of a dozen anti-tank grenades and constant anti-tank rifle fire.

With the soft-lock halting my ability to complete that mission, it also brings to light another flaw with Company of Heroes 3. Although you can save mid-mission at any time and the game autosaves frequently, the menus only let you resume your most recent save. If you want to load a save that isn't the most recent one, it requires you to manually move files around in your computer's file system. I attempted to load a save from the end of the turn before the one that I had the issue with, only to find the issue persist when I did finally take down that Panther. If you save mid-mission and exit the game, when you resume your campaign, it'll put you right back at the start of it, as if you never saved at all.

After writing off any hope of continuing the Italian campaign, I loaded up the Africa campaign. This campaign is more standard and leaves the dynamic campaign aside to deliver a normal progression of a series of pre-set maps and battles, akin to the campaigns found in any of the previous games. In the Africa campaign, you play as Erwin Rommel and command the Germans as they cut a swath through Africa. The fictional story is presented both from Rommel's perspective as well as from the perspective of a father and his daughter who live in Benghazi. The daughter stayed home and deals with German occupation, while her father left to go fight alongside the British.

It's a solid concept for a campaign, but it is also dragged down with the AI's inability to show any real aggression. Barring a paltry token force of a squad or two that might attack a capture point, most of the enemy units on a map in the Africa campaign spawn there and won't move much from those positions. Completing each map becomes an exercise of methodically sweeping the map, rarely wasting the time to consider any sort of defense for the areas you've taken, and eventually completing the objective. It's sad because some of the objectives are quite intriguing, such as one map where you have to use your forces to defend three signal vehicles while they pack up and leave. While defending two is enough for success, trying to defend all three can stretch your units thin and presented a fun challenge.

If there is one thing that the game does as a continuation of the successes of previous offerings in the series, it is still as strong as ever in its overall presentation. Units are quite detailed even after zooming in and looking at a battle close up, and the battlefield becomes more scarred as more fighting takes place. Buildings can be garrisoned and can be seen crumbling into rubble after that building takes sustained heavy artillery fire. I'm not sure that the graphics are an incredible leap from the previous game, but they still stand as some of the strongest you'll find in a real-time strategy game.

Pretty graphics or no, so much of the gameplay of Company of Heroes 3 is flawed in one way or another that it's difficult to recommend it. From campaign-breaking bugs in Italy to the inept AI that renders most Africa maps unsatisfying, the game came out in such a state that it's hard to believe it's part of the same series by the same developer. To the development team's credit, the game has been patched several times since release, but many of the issues persist. There are occasional glimmers of a brilliant game, but with so much of the content damaged by bugs, it is impossible to recommend it over replaying one of the other games of the series.

Score: 6.3/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti