When combined with the granular destruction that the series is known for, where buildings explode and where every piece of cover you see can be destroyed or flattened by vehicle, then yes, Company of Heroes 3 looks quite beautiful. The detail is now driven by material properties, like a modern game.Īnimations are also of a high quality - zoom in on some infantry in combat and you can see them working the action of their weapons, showing obvious recoil on firing - and there are also bespoke animations per unit when reloading occurs as magazines are switched out. Textures are also generally authored at a higher resolution than ever before, and importantly, without a lot of the detail pre-painted in the diffuse texture, so they do not look overly noisy. Similarly, Company of Heroes 3 sees a unified push to make all textures and materials authored in a physically-based manner: the metals of tanks have a really great look to them and look very different from the stone or dirt around them in terms of material quality. Geometric detail is higher, to the point where zooming in on a fruit cart in the battlefield shows each individual fruit. Let's be clear - the game still looks great and has a lot going for it. This is their flagship franchise (sorry DoW fans, I'm one too as well), I think they're out of fuck ups to have, and they saw what happened to Age IV's player numbers (now in a much better place) after launch when the alpha/beta/pre-launch concerns and feedback went unaddressed for too long. I expect Relic to be more responsive on addressing the raised issues. I don't know what happened here during development tbh, like progress on it was suddenly halted last year because it's literally no better than the UI I played with in the closed alpha back in 2021. Worst of all, the overall visual elements look incoherent with each other. One example in the first image below is the fact that you can't tell if the third tier of unlocks requires unlocking the second tier or not, you really have no idea why not or the logic behind that. The campaign UI itself straight up looks and performs like it's unfinished - plenty of weird button placements, low-res icon reuse, and bad communication. Plus, it weirdly omits important things like relevant icon flashes that better communciate if your unit is under attack or retreating in favour of an obnoxious side notification list that appears better suited to an Anno or grand strategy game. The biggest issue to me is the UI, the in-game interface is serviceable but has too many mouse-over tooltips and moving text for my liking, also unit panels don't tell you who the player owner is. I haven't encountered crashes yet, but the game runs better than CoH 2 (that one's naff main menu comes to mind). These alone are genuinely worth a playthough over the past campaigns from the series and RTS' in general, whether now or at a discount later on. I really dig the different companies and upgrade trees. The RTS missions of the dynamic campaign are pretty good, both interesting and fun to play.
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