It's been quite a while since I last played a Company of Heroes game and it feels good to have a more modern one. When I said modern, I of course mean graphically and technologically, since the gameplay is more or less the same as in the older titles. Which isn't a bad thing at all since the gameplay is what made CoH 1 & 2 so damn fun in the first place. I thought the new grand Italian campaign was really fun and opened up the game for new levels of strategy. I'm a strong believer in that giving the player lots of options goes a long way when it comes to making fun strategy games and the new grand campaign offers just that.
However the usefulness vary greatly between all these new tools that are at your disposal. The navy was a nice edition to offer naval bombardments during battles, but other than that it wasn't really worth recruiting ships since the AI doesn't have a strong navy anyway. Airplanes was nice as well for bombing the enemy, just like with the navy. The different emplacements though was complete garbage. They were designed to be defensive weapons in a campaign where you are constantly on the offensive. So they were always out of range and cost to much movement points to reposition all the time. I never really bothered with them and it didn't impact my campaign or experience in the slightest.
I also feel like the campaign was perhaps a little to long. There's a lot of settlements and about half of them was just regular skirmish battles that grew stale after about half the campaign. Especially since you pretty much played with the same roster over and over again. I would've liked there to be a few more story based missions to break up a lot of the monotony that comes from playing regular skirmish battles over and over again. Or at least one or two other forms of skirmishes where you could for example assault a heavily fortified position or something. I was also surprised when the final battle didn't turn out to be Rome itself, which caught me off guard and felt somewhat anti-climactic. The North Africa campaign was fine but not that exciting in the end. It's just 8 story missions that you can play through pretty quickly since a lot of them aren't really that difficult.
I didn't try the multiplayer because I usually prefer to play against people I know and none of my friends currently own this game. But overall it offers a pretty solid, albeit slightly flawed single-player experience that I don't regret playing, but I will probably never play through it again. It's really just a nice single-serving Company of Heroes experience that you consume and then discard afterwards. Perhaps I will pick it up again if they offer a new campaign or if I decide to try out the multiplayer. But from what I've seen of their current dlc plans, I won't be holding my breath anytime soon.
However the usefulness vary greatly between all these new tools that are at your disposal. The navy was a nice edition to offer naval bombardments during battles, but other than that it wasn't really worth recruiting ships since the AI doesn't have a strong navy anyway. Airplanes was nice as well for bombing the enemy, just like with the navy. The different emplacements though was complete garbage. They were designed to be defensive weapons in a campaign where you are constantly on the offensive. So they were always out of range and cost to much movement points to reposition all the time. I never really bothered with them and it didn't impact my campaign or experience in the slightest.
I also feel like the campaign was perhaps a little to long. There's a lot of settlements and about half of them was just regular skirmish battles that grew stale after about half the campaign. Especially since you pretty much played with the same roster over and over again. I would've liked there to be a few more story based missions to break up a lot of the monotony that comes from playing regular skirmish battles over and over again. Or at least one or two other forms of skirmishes where you could for example assault a heavily fortified position or something. I was also surprised when the final battle didn't turn out to be Rome itself, which caught me off guard and felt somewhat anti-climactic. The North Africa campaign was fine but not that exciting in the end. It's just 8 story missions that you can play through pretty quickly since a lot of them aren't really that difficult.
I didn't try the multiplayer because I usually prefer to play against people I know and none of my friends currently own this game. But overall it offers a pretty solid, albeit slightly flawed single-player experience that I don't regret playing, but I will probably never play through it again. It's really just a nice single-serving Company of Heroes experience that you consume and then discard afterwards. Perhaps I will pick it up again if they offer a new campaign or if I decide to try out the multiplayer. But from what I've seen of their current dlc plans, I won't be holding my breath anytime soon.