Company of Heroes Complete Edition (2009)

Movement distance is decent, but executing an attack on an enemy or city spends all your action points, regardless of how many you had. Progress is often slow because you can only take so many actions during your turn with a given unit. In reality, however, progress often grinds to a halt due to many strange design choices, and its many mechanics turn out to be quite shallow and easily ignored or manipulated. The initial design seems engaging – it's got all the foundations of a meta-campaign, including enemy units to fight and cities to take over, new missions that constantly pop up, all while you try to please three different faction commanders to earn their passive bonuses and make occasional choices. Further, it seems that the final 3-4 hours of the Italian campaign has the most bugs and crashes, as up until then the game runs without any issues.ĭuring the Italian campaign, you will manage a few different units as they travel across the map and take on various objectives, engage in combat, and establish supply lines. This sandbox, turn-based Total War / Civilization style campaign has tons of missions to undertake, including optional objectives, and initially appears to have lots of depth and replayability, but it turns out to be a fairly dull affair with most of its 12+ hours constantly struggling with pacing. The second option is the Italian dynamic campaign, which sees you control the Allies as they fight through the country, trying to reach Rome. This campaign is only about 4-5 hours long and is mostly focused on unique combat scenarios, without much time spent base-building.

The North African Operation is a more traditional experience, where you guide the German Afrikakorps through a series of linear missions. To get familiar with the mechanics and most of the factions, you can delve into the single player campaigns. Still, there are plenty of gameplay changes so the initial familiarity is not giving you much of an advantage, and it's nice to have four factions at launch. Three of these factions are returning from the previous game, as they were added in post-launch expansion packs, so fans should be familiar with some of their units and intricacies.

After COH2's Eastern Front setting with Soviet Red Army and Wehrmacht, COH3 switches to Italian and North African theaters of war and features four factions: Allied British and US Forces, and Axis Wehrmacht and Afrikakorps. Just like the rest of the franchise, the latest entry is set during World War II.

Company of Heroes Complete Edition (2009)