Company of Heroes 3: Can two people who don’t know RTS games win a battle on Hard?

It’s an open secret that the RTS, or real-time strategy, genre is a tough nut to crack. Unless you’ve grown up with your fingers on the big red nuke buttons in Command & Conquer, or with your head firmly up the Emperor’s butt in Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War, you may not be aware of some of the intricacies and quirks of this hardcore video game. gender.

You may not know, for example, how to run a base, gather resources, train units, or even how to get between the defenses of an enemy who has been ‘turtle’ for 12 turns and is building a siege-ready army. the likes of which the world has never seen before.

There’s a lot to learn in these games, so we wouldn’t send two or our wide-eyed, inexperienced recruits into the middle of an epic WWII combat simulation armed only with their (lack) general knowledge and the vague desire to survive… could we?

As you can see in the video above, even some clueless British recruits can pull off a campaign of survival in Company of Heroes 3. The real-time strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sega for Windows and PS5 and Xbox Series X. /S, is understandable and readable, even for two newbies with very little understanding of the genre.

Maybe it’s the way the game has been designed on the pad for console play, maybe it’s the great job Sega and Relic have done in presenting the famously hostile console genre well on PS5 and Xbox Series X/ Yes, but something happened to allow our unfortunate partner to (more or less) overcome the challenge at the end.

It’s a credit to the design, user interface, and control scheme, really, that two soldiers with little combat experience can figure out how to bombard enemy units with their bazookas and reclaim oil deposits for their forward bases in a matter of minutes. game. .

As doomed as the initial effort may have seemed, Jim and Connor’s foray into the Mediterranean theater of World War II went… pretty well. Yes, it was a disaster to begin with, and if they were in any kind of actual military service, they would have been stripped of any honor and dishonorably discharged. But, in the end, Connor, at least, managed to band together and move forward to show the Axis forces what British courage is really made of.

Company of Heroes 3 is out now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and it could turn you into a general, if you learn faster than our pair of idiots (and that’s not much of a question, really).