Company of Heroes 3 review: Laptop and desktop benchmarks

Let's just get it out of the way first: we don't fully understand why Company of Heroes 3 have received such overall positive reviews from the press. Firstly, the controls are still somewhat clunky right now (you can also only zoom out a little); secondly, the game's graphics looks rather dated, dull and barren. 

From a technical standpoint, the game hasn't changed much from its almost 10-year-old predecessor (objects are sometimes angular, textures look rather bland, and so on). The only positive thing to highlight is the detailed destruction physics. For instance, after getting hit by heavy projectiles, houses will start losing individual parts before being reduced to rubble. This is visually quite impressive. Nonetheless, we would describe the graphics as just adequate, which is definitely disappointing but still fairly acceptable for a tactics-heavy strategy game.

The graphics menu is likewise relatively modest. The upper section lets you change the display mode, resolution, framerate limit, brightness, scaling and VSync, while the lower section provides only six performance and quality options. We aren't too bothered by the lack of presets because there are only a handful of options available.

One annoying thing is that some changes require you to restart the game, but at least the intro videos can be skipped. It's also a shame that the game automatically stops you from selecting anything above a certain texture detail level based on the amount of (V)RAM in your system.

We like the integrated benchmark in Company of Heroes 3. Although the sequence used in the benchmark is quite long at 1.5 minutes, the AI match features skirmishes between various foot units and vehicles (the exact sequence changes from test run to test run) and is a pretty good representation of a real match.