Those busy French villages have been replaced with even busier Italian ones, cheery little British infantry replaced with a fresh set of cheery little British infantry. Image: RelicĬompany of Heroes 3 knows what worked so well about the first game and keeps pretty much all of it. Company of Heroes 2 went backwards with its dull storyline and less interesting maps, so it’s wonderful seeing Company of Heroes 3 return to the series’ roots, and instead of trying to iterate on perfection, iterate around it.

The complexity of the game’s terrain, full of hedgerows and villages and stone bridges, as well as the opportunities they afforded for cover and flanking made every single encounter with the enemy a challenge you had to solve. It was basically an elaborate puzzle game playing out on a diorama crawling with toy soldiers. And your armies were always relatively small, so every soldier was precious, and you had to manage everyone’s placement meticulously. Your tanks were more vulnerable from the sides and rear than the front, so you had to look after them, not just send them blindly into the fray. You didn’t just have to worry about whether your infantry were in cover or not, but what type of cover. This game rules.Ĭompany of Heroes succeeded because it took ideas about cover that Relic had learned from Dawn of War and - I’m sorry to keep re-using the term but I have to - perfected them.

I’m here to say that my misgivings were for naught. Indeed that disappointing sequel’s fate gave me enormous misgivings when a third game was announced a couple of years back if one successor pivoted slightly from perfection and suffered as a result, surely a third would do the same? Even Company of Heroes’ own sequel fell short of the benchmark set by its predecessor, so when I talk about how good that game was, I am not fucking around.

Company of heroes 1 vs 3