“Company of Heroes 3” media early access online event summary

Delving in the RTS field for more than 20 years, Relic Entertainment has brought to us again another WW2 themed RTS game, their latest entry in the series, “Company Of Heroes 3”. And Nmia has invited SEGA over to join the media early access event. We’ve had the chance to get our hands on the campaigns and PVP before the game is officially launched. For someone who hasn’t been playing much RTS, a RTS newbie in other words, how would it feel to be playing the game? Let’s have a look at the game from my point of view!

The campaign that I’ve experienced this time around is the Dynamic Campaign of the Italy map. The campaign starts with securing the shores and landing our troops, with the objective of liberating Gela, a town located way south on the Sicily island. We’ll be faced with firepower suppression from the opposition from the beginning. In Company Of Heroes, if your soldiers fall under suppression by the enemies, they will be pinned at their place of cover, losing most of their mobility, and can only choose to retreat. In the tutorial, the players are guided to choose soldiers who are pinned on spot, and command them to retreat from danger. Afterwards, the players get to control the infantry and engineers, flanking the enemy’s heavy machine gun while destroying 2 turrets to clear the basic gameplay tutorial.

Before entering the beta, the only RTS game I’ve played is the Warcraft 3 from Blizzard, and the gameplay consists of resource gathering, base building, and commanding heroes and creep units to fight. And it is way different in Company Of Heroes, where it is not necessary to micro manage every unit in fight, but assigning commands to groups of soldiers. Only when the soldiers are accessing stationary weapons such as mortars is when they’ll split up to their assigned tasks. Besides, the main objectives in the campaign is mainly capturing and liberating areas, and gains extra resources after doing so. Parts of the captured areas can also be repurposed into medical stations to provide support for the frontline soldiers. Such strategy heavy gameplay that focuses on battlefield strategies is quite interesting and at the same time having a lower learning curve for newbies like me.

And in the “Company Of Heroes 3”, the newly added Tactical Pause for offline campaigns is a lifesaver for newbies like me, where players get to the battlefield anytime, and assign commands to each unit before unpausing the game. The maximum assignable commands is 8 commands, and the unit’s pathing is shown on the map as well. Commands are easily cancelled by pressing a single button. For a series that pursues realism, Company Of Heroes might not have the most complex controls, but the main focus is for players to analyse the battle and ongoing situations. This may take time for newcomers to learn, such as determining if taking cover in the building ahead is wise or nay. As such, I would highly recommend newbies to utilise the Tactical Pause to learn the ropes as they go, one step at a time.

In this “Company of Heroes 3” experience, I was also impressed by the soldier units I operated. These infantry in the game have very detailed animation performances. For instance, you can clearly see the soldiers stomping the door and tossing a grenade into buildings; when you are being suppressed, you will fall to the ground and hold your head, the process of infantry climbing up the tank and moving together, or the action of anti-aircraft artillery ammunition loading, or even the basic shooting has a clear reloading animation, with various commands and voices of the soldiers , it is difficult for you to operate them as just a game, but unconsciously commanding your subordinates like an officer, resisting waves after waves of attacks from the enemy on the stronghold and win even the most difficult looking fights.

“Company of Heroes 3” also has an experience value system that belongs to each unit. When you kill an enemy unit, you can get experience points. After accumulating enough experience, you will level up. In addition to the numerical improvement, some special abilities will also be unlocked. Like the sprint movement of infantry, the flamethrower of engineers, and the tank can also unlock commands for focusing on enemy machine gun turrets. These abilities will allow more diversified tactics on the battlefield, but you must choose your strategy carefully, otherwise it is still easy to be wiped out by the enemy’s strategies.

As for the dynamic campaign that made its debut appearance in “Company of Heroes 3” this time, it is actually similar to a more turn-based sandbox RTS gameplay. Players can control units to act on the big map in each round. Each action consumes a resource called AP. You can choose to engage in quick battles with the enemy, occupy strongholds or other actions, depending on the terrain where the unit is located. The corresponding buffs or debuffs will be applied on different terrains as well. In some important strongholds, traditional RTS encounters will still be encountered, so that the combination of RTS and turn-based gameplay prevents players from playing turn-based battles all the time. There are also the so-called loyalty rewards in the game. At some crucial moments during the fights, the deputy commander will pop up to ask your offensive opinion. Some choices will let you gain their loyalty and the combat gains they bring, such as air defence support, Militia units and so on, this also allows the entire Italian campaign to have more branches of routes to play. I have to say that Relic Entertainment has made a very interesting attempt in terms of playability.

Compared to the three tests done previously, the game has gained very significant improvements The official also emphasised that they have made many changes to the game’s art, lighting, and balancing between different units. Of course, the previously criticised UI has also been greatly improved, but I’ve still encountered a small bug in the dialog box text shifting during the game. After completing a certain task, there is also a chance of getting stuck for a long time. I hope these bugs and issues can be resolved in the official version.

Due to the conflicts in the scheduling of this beta test, I was not able to participate in the multiplayer online test against other media friends, so I couldn’t really say much about the multiplayer part here, but this time there are four factions available in the first launch to play with, I believe that the game comes with a good sum of contents to have a good experience. In general, as a player who experienced “Company of Heroes 3” for the first time, the expressiveness of the game is still very shocking even in these times. The game system is friendly to newcomers, the battlefield BGM gets the adrenaline pumped, and many fun game mechanics await. The interesting game mechanism makes me recognize its playability as an RTS. For players who like realistic RTS might want to start following this brand new masterpiece brought by Relic Entertainment next year.

Above is the experience sharing of this media early access beta event. “Company of Heroes 3” will be released on February 23, 2023 on the Steam platform. If you want to follow more official latest news, you can click the portal to the official website or official Twitter to learn more.