The maps consistently present fun situations that understand how maneuver is at the heart of Company of Heroes firefights. If you ignore all of that story and campaign context, which you might, the scenario and map design in both North Africa and Italy are actually quite good.

It'd be neat as a bite-size prelude to the Italian Campaign, but the story falls flat as anything other than some pretty animatics and a series of decent RTS scenarios. The juxtaposition is poorly handled, failing to show the context of how action in one affects the other. These are two interesting stories, but the way they're presented alongside each other doesn't work.

What’s odd is that, interleaved with those scenarios, is the story of the war as narrated by a North African Jewish family that has been split apart by the German-Italian invasion and conquest, showing how Nazi and Fascisti occupation so devastated those communities that they barely exist today. You play as Rommel's Afrika Korps, fighting marquee battles from the Germans’ very successful campaigns of 19. It's all very visually similar to the setup of the Total War series. It has theoretically complex systems in which your armies – called companies (with heroes in them) – capture towns and ports using deployable air power and naval fleet movements, and build emplacements to defend territory or provide offensive bonuses in battles. The larger one is the Italian Campaign, a broad, turn-based strategic mode on a large map of central and southern Italy that has you capture territory town by town, and took me about 25 hours to complete the first time around. There are actually two single-player campaigns in CoH3. While individual missions and scenarios within the strategic sandbox are strong and even thrilling at times, almost every feature on the strategic map doesn't work, either because it's bugged or because it's such middle-of-the-road game design that it's simply boring. What I'm very displeased about is that the ambitious Italian campaign mode is incredibly disappointing. I'm pleased to say that Company of Heroes 3 implements those series fundamentals quite well in a gentle remix that brings the series to diverse theaters of World War 2 that it hadn't touched yet. The Company of Heroes series is near and dear to my heart – all three of them are real-time strategy games that cut to the core of the genre, focusing on overarching strategic decisions coupled with tactical troop movements and a battlefield that truly matters.

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