Company of Heroes 3

Lore & Background

Company of Heroes 3 was developed by Relic Entertainment, with the team choosing the Mediterranean theatre to include a variety of environments, a feature frequently requested by players of older games. The Italian areas offered a 'broader palette for environmental gameplay,' allowing players to use verticality in maps for planning moves and attacks. At the beginning of development, the studio recruited modders and competitive players to form a player council, which worked with Relic during preproduction to determine the new entry's mechanical focus and setting. The executive producer noted that the Mediterranean was chosen over the Pacific by a 10-0 vote among the council. Player testing started prior to the official announcement through Amplitude's Games2Gether program, and a limited-time demo was available shortly after the announcement. The game was officially announced for Windows in July 2021, delayed from November 17, 2022, to February 23, 2023, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions announced at The Game Awards 2022 and released on May 30, 2023. In August 2022, Polish toy company Cobi acquired a license to publish North Africa and Italy themed brick sets.

Reader's Guide

Company of Heroes 3 received 'generally favorable' reviews on PC and Xbox Series X according to Metacritic, while the PlayStation 5 version received 'mixed or average' reviews. It was nominated for 'Best Sim / Strategy Game' at The Game Awards 2023. Critics offered mixed assessments: PC Gamer found the Italian campaign 'fundamentally broken' with lacking AI aggressiveness and 'confused' subcommanders. PCGamesN felt the gameplay lacked innovation but lived up to previous entries, calling the central story missions 'a hell of a lot of fun.' Eurogamer enjoyed the bombastic spectacle, noting 'everything can be blown to bits.' IGN liked set piece encounters but criticized the campaign map decisions as 'low-stakes.' Polygon praised the new active pause system for making the game 'vastly more approachable.' Rock Paper Shotgun felt unpolished elements were offset by the impressive scope of the Italian campaign. Kotaku noted the new setting proved a match for interesting tactical encounters. TouchArcade found visuals inconsistent on small screens but gameplay intact on Steam Deck. NPR criticized the Italian campaign's repetitiveness but praised multiplayer as 'fast, intense, and unrelenting.'

Did You Know?

• The game features a Tactical Pause system that lets players pause battles and queue commands.
• Italian Partisans appear as allied NPCs that can be used on the map or called in during battles.
• The player council voted 10-0 for the Mediterranean theatre over the Pacific.
• A Polish toy company, Cobi, released North Africa and Italy themed brick sets under license from Relic Entertainment.

The Real-Time Strategy Blueprint

Company of Heroes 3 sits squarely within the real-time strategy tradition, a subgenre where players continuously manage resources and direct units toward objectives without the pause of turn-based play. The term itself was coined by Brett Sperry in the early 1990s to market Dune II, but the underlying design philosophy stretches much further back. In the classic template that CoH3 inherits, each player positions structures, maneuvers multiple units under indirect control, secures map areas, and works to destroy an opponent's assets. Growth is gated by accumulated resources, which are gathered by controlling specific map points or by maintaining dedicated production structures. The typical loop—resource-gathering, base-building, technological development, and unit command—forms the structural backbone that a title like CoH3 builds upon. Rather than alternating moves with an adversary, the player must juggle all of these systems simultaneously, making every second of gameplay a continuous negotiation between economy, expansion, and combat.

A Genre Forged Across Decades

The real-time strategy genre did not arrive fully formed; it emerged through a long, fragmented period of experimentation across multiple regions. In the United Kingdom, titles like Stonkers (1983) and Nether Earth (1987) on the ZX Spectrum explored real-time strategic thinking. In North America, The Ancient Art of War (1984) is retrospectively classified as an early RTS entry, and Cytron Masters (1982) has been called possibly the first real-time strategy game, though critics note it leaned more tactical than strategic due to the absence of unit construction and resource management. Japan contributed Bokosuka Wars (1983) and later Herzog Zwei (1989), the latter widely credited as a progenitor of modern RTS design for introducing unit construction, resource management, and base control in a fully real-time, unpausable format. These separate threads—British, American, and Japanese—gradually merged into the unified worldwide tradition that modern titles like Company of Heroes 3 now inhabit.

Drawing the Genre Line

Not every game that involves strategy or real-time action qualifies as real-time strategy, and the boundaries matter for understanding where Company of Heroes 3 sits in the broader landscape. City-building games, construction and management simulations, and real-time tactics titles share conceptual DNA with the RTS template but are generally not subsumed under that label. The distinction is subtle but important: an RTS game specifically combines resource-gathering, base-building, technological progression, and indirect unit control within a continuous real-time framework. A real-time tactics game, by contrast, typically lacks the economic and construction layers. God games, where a player assumes a creator-like role, occupy yet another category. Even among early titles the line was blurry—Utopia (1982) blended turn-based cycles with real-time elements, and Mega-Lo-Mania (1991) offered deep resource management and technology trees without direct military unit control. Recognizing these boundaries helps clarify what makes the CoH3 experience distinctly a strategy game rather than a simulation or pure tactical shooter.

The Player's Demanding Canvas

Playing a real-time strategy game like Company of Heroes 3 is a cognitively demanding endeavor, and the genre's user interfaces evolved specifically to handle that load. The tasks a player must juggle—gathering resources, constructing buildings, researching upgrades, and directing multiple units—create a complexity that gave rise to sophisticated control schemes. Many of these schemes borrowed directly from desktop computing environments; the most recognizable example is the click-and-drag box selection, where a player drags a rectangle across the screen to select every unit within that area at once. This technique, now so fundamental it feels native to gaming, was actually lifted from the broader computer interface vocabulary. The continuous, unpausable nature of real-time play means there is no turn to think in; decisions about economy, positioning, and combat must be made on the fly. This is a stark contrast to turn-based strategy, where players can deliberate at length between moves. The result is a genre that rewards multitasking, spatial awareness, and rapid prioritization—skills that a title like CoH3 demands of every player from the opening seconds onward.