Company of Heroes 3 Console Edition Review in Progress

thesixthaxis.com:

Every time that a PC-centric game series makes the jump to console, I approach it with equal parts anticipation and trepidation. How will it handle the jump from mouse and keyboard to gamepad? Will it make sacrifices along the way? How hard will I need to squint to make out the UI from across the room? Company of Heroes 3 is the latest game to make the leap, the popular WW2 RTS series promising a fully rethought interface for consoles.

Unfortunately, first impressions when playing on Playstation 5 are of mild bewilderment. You’re almost unceremoniously dumped into the tutorial mission, and then taught concepts in a slightly higgledy-piggledy fashion, starting with how to retreat a unit back to base. Things do become more coherent as you go, with a mixture of dialogue and quick pop ups explaining controls and Company of Heroes 3’s specific game mechanics for capturing outposts, using cover in combat, and the like.

The control scheme on gamepad takes a little getting used to and threw me off with a few key elements, specifically that ‘Circle’ is actually an attack move instead of deselecting a unit, and that the radial menus that you bring up require the left analogue stick to highlight options. This makes sense when you need the right face buttons to select things, but it’s odd to not let the right stick also be active, and that you’ve a mix of a unit command menu that needs a trigger to be held, while building commands are toggled with Up on the D-pad.

The UI is generally clear and visible from a distance, but that’s because the key interactions you have are attached to the immovable central cursor, context sensitive icons matched to the face buttons that trigger them. At times, dialogue and tutorial tooltips clutter things