Company of Heroes 3: North Africa Hands-On Gameplay Preview

ign.com:

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. The fighters on the North African front in Company of Heroes 3 seem inclined to agree with me. A far cry from the breezy, blooming Italian beaches we saw in IGN’s last preview, the other side of the Mediterranean theater is parched, oppressive, and sparsely-settled. It takes a rugged army with the ability to keep the tank treads running in far less than ideal conditions to succeed here. And the new Deutsch Afrika Korps – who will also be playable in multiplayer as a separate roster from the already revealed German Wehrmacht – are up to the task.

The mission I got to play involves breaking through British lines and capturing a nearby town in order to cut off their retreat. This is part of a linear Axis campaign set during the earlier years of the war that will serve to complement the open-ended, Total War-esque Allied campaign in Italy that I looked at last year. While it certainly added to the workload, Relic wanted to provide a single-player experience more geared toward fans of old-school RTS campaigns, who are more interested in the tactical battles than managing a whole theater on the strategic level.

The DAK seems designed almost as a direct counterpoint to the polished, precise, carefully-orchestrated Wehrmacht. If the German forces in Italy are an expensive pocket watch, the North African troops are a potato clock you put together with whatever was on hand and you're hoping it will still run after you've dragged it through a couple of sand dunes and maybe an artillery barrage. They're well-adapted to the harsh conditions they've been forced to fight in, and have a strong focus on improvised tactics and getting battered armor back into