Company of Heroes 3

Outfoxing your human foes remains excellent in Relic's latest, Company of Heroes 3. The heart of this World War 2 RTS' combat and faction design is stronger than ever.

Navigating a tonal minefield with just enough confidence, Company of Heroes 3 is a big, refined, and beautifully textured addition to an already brilliant series.

Company of Heroes 3 is a spectacular RTS that manages to shine even when the main campaign doesn't.

I’m a sucker for studios that don’t play things safe. IO Interactive kept toying with the Hitman formula until the very end, Supergiant reinvents itself with every new release, and there’s not a genre that Thunderful won’t touch. With Company of Heroes 3, Relic could have easily taken the safe route — or, to put it in Sid Meier-speak, ignored the “completely new” and “improved” pillars of sequel design in favor of something familiar. Instead, it looked outward, recognized what made the best modern strategy games tick, and adopted those factors into its own formula. Company of Heroes 3 is a great sequel, yes. But it’s also just an excellent game.

After ten years away, Company Of Heroes 3 returns with two stonkingly good single-player campaigns and a bevy of multiplayer options. Its enormous Italian operation could have more tension in the way you conquer the map, but its RTS battles remain as compelling as ever, and the sheer breadth and variety on offer here will please new and veteran players alike.

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.

For anyone familiar with the series (and the RTS genre itself), Company of Heroes 3 is a solid but flawed entry. For newcomers, getting to grips with the controls and trudging through the patchy Italian campaign might not be worth the price of enlistment. However, if you do learn its intricacies, you're rewarded with fantastic, intense combat. It's a great effort to translate the RTS to console even with one or two issues.

Company of Heroes 3 is a splendid and rewarding RTS game. Tense battles, brilliant map design, and streamlined unit management make it easily one of the best in the genre, with the Italian campaign acting as an exciting blueprint for the series’ future. If Relic wants to use Company of Heroes to tell serious and significant stories, though, the team needs to commit to actually doing that beyond just giving them a surface treatment.

Company of Heroes 3 is a triumphant return to the game that raised the bar for Real-Time Strategy. With unparalleled action on the battlefield, that alone makes it work your while. The new grand-strategy campaign is a welcome addition, though it has some flaws, ranging from performance issues and bugs to simply being too easy. Despite this, it's impossible not to recommend Company of Heroes 3 for the excellent game that it is.

Relic has taken everything that makes the first two games great and made sufficient additions to help Company of Heroes 3 succeed in this renaissance of RTS titles.