Note: This game was received as a gift from a friend.

Of all the upcoming games, CoH3 was one of the ones I was by far and away most excited for. It is with that in mind that I must express my horrible disappointment at the results.

I'll start with this: The base gameplay of Company of Heroes 3 offers very little new to it. We have the new "campaign" mode, where many are reporting technical issues (which I have no doubt will be addressed in a timely manner), but the battles themselves are identical on a base mechanical level aside from the tech trees, which are a mash of the tech mechanics from 1 and 2.

In CoH1, factions have a couple tech trees that are linear. CoH2, we have a variety of "commanders" (functionally tech trees) that provide a handful of bonuses. In CoH3, we have smaller trees than in 1, but (presumably), we'll have a variety of them as we did in 2. I say it like this because, currently, we only have a few for each faction. I expect the others will be premium purchases, as there is currently a grayed out "Store" tab present in the game, which is exactly how they did things in CoH2.

Aside from that, what we have in 3 that we did not have before are changes to the factions, as well as a new faction, the Afrikakorps. Only the American faction seems to have a competent number of units and choices, the other three factions all feel exceptionally gimped. Unit variety and selection is, at large, nonexistent.

Vehicles, universally, are a bad bet. Their damage is usually fine, with the exception of the British tanks which are simply terrible, but the durability of vehicles, especially tanks, is an absolute joke. Single bazooka squads can and will kill a medium, fairly expensive tank, in a 1v1.

Artillery too is simply awful, with both low damage and very little spread to its damage.

On top of that, the resource economy is badly balanced, prices have increased from the previous games but income has not. This makes it tedious to get units at best, and impossible to combat higher map control at worst.

I personally did not have a problem with the sound quality, as many others have reported (some of the accents are not quite right, but that's a separate issue from sound quality), but I did notice some things lacking in the visuals department. Artillery especially has an issue where you can visibly tell that the resulting explosion did not come from the projectile.

(Edit: So, paying more attention to the sound with a bit more time put in the game, there are audio issues. Things like the sounds of rockets firing regularly occur a second or more after the rockets actually fire, single shot rifles use generic burst-shot sound effects, that kind of thing. The audio quality of it isn't necessarily poor, but it's horribly inaccurate in many cases and completely lacks the striking sounds of the previous games.)

While I don't personally take much issue with the graphical style of the game, I must agree with many others that it does not seem to be much improved. This makes it baffling that their highest texture detail setting requires a shocking 16GB of VRAM. I have no idea what they've done to require that, because the textures sure don't reflect it. Reportedly they're working on it, they seem to recognize its insane, but I want to mention it because it's a major red flag.

The game possesses quite a few bugs. This ranges from glitched visuals to unit abilities not working to my control settings being reset every time the game is closed.

The last thing I want to mention is the game's UI. It's bad. The main menu is oversized with few visuals, the settings menu feels too large, the in-game UI takes up a massive portion of the screen. The UI actually looks like it's designed for tablets? I wonder if that's purposeful, in a way, as I know they did port CoH1 to tablets in the past, so maybe they're preparing for something like that?

I hold out hope for the future of the game, as I desperately want a fresh Company of Heroes experience, but with the current state of the game I do believe it will be a long time before they're there, if they ever reach it.

Currently, if you're looking for a definitive Company of Heroes experience, I recommend the "All Units (170 added)" mod for CoH2, as that is by far and away the best time I've had with the series.

Update (3/30/2023): Premium shop has arrived, stocked full of lackluster cosmetics, with very few being purchasable from earnable currency (because why would a $60-$80 game NOT need multiple currencies with microtransaction options?).

At the time of writing, the shop is divided between two tabs, "Highlights" and "Cosmetics". "Highlights" contains expensive skin pack advertisements, as well as your standard FOMO rotating shop with infantry recolor skins. The rotating items are purchasable with both premium and earnable currencies, but are unavailable outside of this. The "Cosmetics" tab features, currently, 16 options, a few of which being packs, and only ONE being purchasable with earnable currency. And no, that single one is not a pack.

Let us compare this to the previous games. CoH1 had...none of this. CoH2 had a single currency, that was both purchasable and earnable. Mind you, it was a pain to earn, but you could at least get what you wanted. What CoH3 has is...disgusting.

On top of this, the game is still seriously lacking basic features and content present in past games.

Unfinished and insulting is a more than adequate description of this title one month after release.