I was skeptical about buying Company of Heroes (CoH) 3 🎮 because of the mixed reviews. I’m glad I did, the game is a lot of fun so far.

For those unfamiliar, CoH is a WW2 RTS game, and in my opinion, one of the only ones still worth playing. It has the correct balance of micro squad management without drowning you in details. I’ve been playing CoH since the first one came out in 2006. In case you’re curious, CoH2 should work on Linux and Mac too, and it still looks excellent by today’s standards.

I haven’t encountered serious bugs in the game (but there are a few minor ones), and I tried both Windows and Linux (using Proton). CoH3 presents a campaign map (Italy) where you take over cities and bases from the occupying Nazi forces. These give you bonuses and experiences for your units which in turn give them bonuses in real-time battles, like airstrikes, additional units, abilities to heal, etc.

I haven’t played a skirmish game against AI yet, which is where I spend most of my time in CoH games - over 2,000 hours alone on Steam in CoH2. The big additions to the series in CoH3, the campaign map and the ability to pause mid-battle to assign orders to your units, don’t work in skirmishes, so I wonder if the game will lose some of its appeal when I play in these modes.

So far, the third game adds plenty of variety while being less complex (so far anyway) during real-time battles, which is an improvement over the first two games.