Company Of Heroes 3 is reporting for duty on November 17th

Relic Entertainment has announced that Company Of Heroes 3 will be parachuting onto Steam on November 17th. They also unveiled new details about its second North African campaign this evening, which will offer a more traditional, narrative-led single-player experience compared to its more open-ended Italian campaigh, which was revealed last year. We had hoped to bring you more hands on details of this new campaign this evening, but in classic RTS fashion, things didn’t quite go according to plan. Sorry about that folks. Here are the headlines instead.

The live action reveal trailer below doesn’t give much away, but it does hint at one of the new mechanics for Company Of Heroes 3’s North African Operation campaign: tank riding. Here, you’ll be able to pack your army lads onto the back of your tanks for some rapid-fire assault tactics. the streaminghosted by cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, also showed off its new side armor additions, enemy vehicle recovery, vehicle towing and more.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait until November to get a taste of what the North African campaign has to offer. Like last year’s big reveal, Relic are putting out a ‘Mission Alpha’ build that lets you sample one mission from newly revealed campaign. You’ll just need to head over to the Company Of Heroes website and sign up for Relic’s community feedback program – COH Development – although if you have any previous pre-alpha builds installed, the Mission Alpha should appear in your Steam library automatically. The mission is free to play on Steam for one week, starting from today until July 19th.

Relic also released a new developer diary on how they’ll be supporting the game post-launch as well. Have a watch of it below. Tank battle royales, anyone?

I’ve been playing 2013’s Company Of Heroes 2 for the first time recently and have been having a great, if somewhat grim, time tackling its main campaign, so I’m well excited about the prospect of two campaigns to tackle in Company Of Heroes 3. We’ll be bringing you more thoughts on what we think of the Mission Alpha build very soon, but for now, November 17th can’t come soon enough.