While this is a positive review, I do want to start off by saying that you should absolutely not get Final Stand for it's full price of €30. It is [i]not[/i] worth that much. I paid roughly €19 for it, and that was still a bit too pricey. I think €15 is about what this mode might be worth.
With that said, I've always loved the Company of Heroes series. It's long been one of my favourite RTS games, simply because of its units. Having interesting and fun unit design is the single most important aspect for me in any RTS, and COH had the best of it. The fact that a Tank can just shrug off small arms fire, and that you need dedicated Anti-Tank units to counter them is great. This isn't like Axis & Allies, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, or all the numerous other RTS where, yes, counter units exist, but if you shoot enough arrows at the tank, it will eventually crumble. Nothing wrong with those mechanics, but I think the way COH does it is so much more fun. It makes armoured vehicles feel so much more powerful, and conversely, it also makes Anti-Vehicle units a lot more enjoyable to play with, because you get to kill the normally unbeatable Tanks.
And COH3 is probably my favourite of the COHs. I know people have issues with it, but as someone who only plays Skirmishes against the AI with friends, all of us being really bad at the game, and constantly being stuck in our base for an hour, COH3 not only made really nice improvements - IIRC, a small base fuel income, more detailed vehicle armour, being able to see your individual infantrymen's HP - but also had some really fun units as well. Particularly Flamethrowers, who, in my unskilled opinion, felt quite weak in the prior games, but now feel devastating. And I love Flamethrowers in any game that they're in, so that's a genuine big plus for me.
And as someone who regularly played Skirmishes against overwhelming AI opponents, Final Stand is basically tailor-made for me. It's just a holdout wave defence against an AI opponent. With added Roguelike elements.
Those roguelike elements are both better and worse than I first imagined. Better, because they do genuinely feel impactful. I've seen [i]soooooo[/i] many roguelikes which have upgrades that read "Deal 5% more damage," but Final Stand realises that generic upgrades are fine, you just have to pump those numbers up. So you have upgrades such as "Infantry Armour Penetration increased by 100%," or "Unit Veterancy Gain increased by 100%."
Equally, the choices you have to make between units do a good job at making your runs feel varied. You end up with ~6 units to produce in the end - I've only played the Afrikakorps, I don't know if other factions get different stuff - and since they are organised in tiers (Early, mid, & late game), you can genuinely specialise quite well. I've had games where I kind of went all in on Panzerjägers, boosting their stats a bunch, and allowing them to handle tanks really easily, but then getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by enemy artillery or infantry. I've also had runs where I've went hard into Artillery, and was able to destroy large clumps of enemies before they've even reached my lines, but struggled with more mobile or spread out forces.
The roguelike elements are then worse than I imagined, because you do see a lot of the same ones. I'm pretty sure I've seen every unit and perk available to the Afrikakorps multiple times over, and because there are some units that I don't particularly like - e.g. Kriegsmarine - I do tend to fall back on a lot of the same things.
Especially because the perks you can pick up are - luckily - tailored to the build you are running. For example, I haven't ever seen the "100% increased Mine Blast Radius" upgrade when I didn't have Engineers capable of planting them, and I haven't seen the Vehicle Armour Upgrades when the only Vehicle I had was the Walking Stuka Rocket Launcher. This is a good thing, because it prevents you from getting too screwed by the RNG, but it does make it so that the pool of potential perks is smaller.
Now, so far, this hasn't been a problem for me, because I enjoy the gameplay, even if it is the same. As I said, I've only played the Afrikakorps so far, and that has given me 10 hours of enjoyment already. I still have 3 more factions to play after this. But it might be more of a problem for you.
The difficulty is in an appropriate spot I would say. I finally beat Extreme +2 difficulty just recently, after unlocking around ~60% of the Afrikakorps' tech tree. I had 5+ runs where I failed right at the very last wave, because the numbers were just too overwhelming. And I still have Extreme +3 to go. A better player than me could have definitely done it a lot earlier in the tech tree, especially because, even though they've removed Munition costs from the Battlegroup abilities you can select in your run - which means that I can actually finally play with them, because my skirmishes in base COH3 usually had me with no munitions throughout the game - I'm still bad about using them properly.
I will also say that I have not tried out the co-op yet, and that's where I think the price tag is the biggest downside. I could easily see myself getting €19 worth of enjoyment out of this. I could even see myself getting €30 worth of enjoyment, but it's a lot harder to convince someone else to also do that. Especially because I've had to buy COH3 for my friends, and this is still mostly the same game, so they'd just be buying it again. If it was €15, I could justify gifting it to one of them, and if it was €12, they'd probably end up buying it themselves, but at €30, it's just too much. Especially since the co-op is only 2 players. I think it'll probably still be very fun, I haven't tried it yet, but it's a much harder sell when, with the 3 of us, one would always have to sit out.
