The first campaign is a crawl through southern Italy, with a landing in Serrano and a vague objective to take Rome.

This changes from real-time to turn-based, as you zoom right out to see the theater as a whole. The other side of the coin is the campaign map. I do wish the camera would let me zoom out a wee bit though. It rewards creative and tactical thinking, which I appreciated. I frequently used Gurkha rifle squadrons to pin enemies down, then flanked them with riflemen. Flanking and fortifying are your best bets, following by destroying the cover with a particularly big gun. Your troops are left picking at each other, taking no casualties and wondering if they should have brought a sleeping bag. If you and your foes are both behind cover then things slow right down. Otherwise they’ll be cut down in seconds.

To keep your plucky fellows alive, you have to to move from cover to cover. The combat maintains its emphasis on tactics, with the biggest focus being on cover. It creates a pleasant arc of conflict, as you clash around key contested points. As you progressively capture territory, and bolster your troops, you’ll inevitably come in contact with the enemy doing the same thing. In order to recruit more squads, you need resources which are gained from holding specific points on the map. This is the ground-level combat, where you control individual squads and vehicles. Let’s take skirmishes first, as these hark back to Company of Heroes of old. Company of Heroes 3 is split into two areas: skirmishes and campaigns.

Games like company of heroes