Three Moves Ahead 584: Company of Heroes 3

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 584:

Company of Heroes 3
Rob and Ian are joined by Kotaku's Luke Plunkett to dig in to Company of Heroes 3. The long-awaited World War II RTS left us with mixed feelings, between a dynamic campaign that just doesn't really work and some of the best battle maps the series has ever seen. So how does it all stack up when the smoke clears? And what about that North Africa operation?

Company of Heroes 3

 

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[Strike Logic]

I shared a lot of the feeling of this podcast - the game is frustrating with a lack of care and attention, but once you get past that, very playable.

 

It makes a really bad first impression - the little tutorial you play has boring design, bad artwork (the images of the voice actor's face) and bad audio (gunfire that sounds like a muted typewriter). Then you get to the main menu which is so poorly implemented it manages to have bugs. Bugs! I've never seen a main menu that has bugs before.

 

I have put a decent amount of time into it, but what the podcast didn't really take the game to task for, is that basically all the best bits of this game, like the visual effects, balance between different units, territory control etc. - all the stuff that makes Company of Heroes what it is - has already been around since the first game. As said on the podcast though, this entry basically adds nothing new that's good, all the stuff they added either conceptually doesn't work, or they've screwed up stuff they did better before like the audio. They're just coasting, but it looks like this game has already been financially successful. That sucks.

 

But I'm just going to add a little rant here - I'm really irritated there's no Italian faction. I'm surprised none of the reviews or this podcast commented on this. It's a game half set in Italy during WW2! There are two German factions and no Italian faction! What the hell!

 

For so long WW2 games have been obsessed with Normandy, then maybe the Ardennes, then there's a handwave, and the game is over. It's a total disservice to one of the most important eras in human history. It's frustrating seeing a review of this game call this part of the war "what's left to do in WW2." I think people who play games have a really warped sense of how WW2 actually happened, and I hoped this game might just nudge people in the right direction. But to not even include an Italy faction in a game set in Italy is just bizarre.

 

Why is it that whenever WW2 comes up, people just want U.S. rangers shooting at German Stormtroopers in a hedgerow, and absolutely nothing else?

 

Please, please, please give me more big budget WW2 games about the air war over Germany, the Norwegian resistance attacking German heavy water sites, the Burma campaign, China vs Japan, the Abyssinian campaign, the U Boat war, the Winter War, spies and double agents, the home front, actually feature other Axis powers (Romania alone sent over 1 million men!), Bletchley Park and code breaking, the Soviet/Japan clashes, or literally anything else. There's so so much rich material here!

[derbius]

Your reactions collectively were also mine largely but I wish you had spent more time talking about Ardennes assault which was excellent and if it had been simply adopted to the new theater might have made a good game better. I can see how the designers thought they would make it a lot richer but then succumbed to scope creep. I am still hopeful they can do a paradox and refine it into something good. The other two things I would make more of is that particularly in the single player campaign skirmishes the enemy is normally so much more powerful at least so far ( and at the same time tactically clumsy) it seems impossible even with tactical pause to play a nuanced mobile game. Instead, it almost always seems to degenerate into spotting the enemy and pulverizing him with artillery and/or smoke. And lastly I would have made more of the disappointing fact that the factions are not more distinct with the possible exception of the fun way the DAK is tuned to recycling enemy vehicles and repairing their own. ( the second time I played Gazala the key to my eventual success was grabbing and repurposing an Archer tank destroyer).