The bonuses you'll receive are sometimes pretty helpful if not especially flashy, like reduced ability cooldowns, but when it comes to developing the relationships that unlock them, there's a serious lack of friction. Win enough fights and Valenti doesn't give a shit how many Italian towns you completely demolish. The British General Norton, US General Buckram and Italian partisan leader Valenti each have their own goals and personalities, and by agreeing with them in occasional conversations, performing missions for them, or simply acting in a way they like, you fill up their loyalty bar and unlock their bonuses. Again, we have a list of unlockable bonuses, but this time it's loyalty, not experience, that unlocks them. Subcommanders only add to the messiness by introducing one more progression system-another interesting idea that doesn't quite land.

Together these give you a tonne of options for how to approach every assault. Capturing ports, meanwhile, increases your population cap and gives you more ships, which can strike at enemy targets from the sea. Capture an airfield and you can start sending out reconnaissance planes to remove the fog of war, or bombers to prepare targets for a ground assault. So there are a lot of targets to destroy, but also lots of opportunities to build.Īlong with the emplacements you can pointlessly cover Italy in, conquest provides yet more things to spend your resources on. The Indian Artillery Company, for instance, can bombard enemy positions, softening up towns, removing emplacements, blowing up bridges and weakening enemy companies. The Italian campaign, then, is fundamentally broken.Įach company you requisition is a powerful toolkit that contains not just a distinct selection of units you'll field in the RTS scraps, but also a range of abilities that help on the campaign map. And even in this seemingly unfinished state, good ideas bubble to the surface, if you can push past the very rough UI and impotent opponent.

This is especially frustrating when it's clear how great it could have been. The Italian campaign, then, is fundamentally broken.

Company of heroes 3 release date