Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand is a standalone expansion for the core game, adding a new roguelite wave-defence mode. It takes one of the most exciting parts of Company of Heroes — those desperate battles where you’re trying to hold the line against overwhelming odds — and makes that the entire focus. On paper, it sounds good, but in reality, it’s a bare-bones mode that adds little and costs a lot. Let’s jump into the review, shall we?
REVIEW AT A GLANCE
Developer Relic Entertainment
Publisher Relic Entertainment
Reviewed On PC
Available On PC
Release Date July 29, 2026
Price (UK) £23.99/£19.19 for COH3 owners
Genre RTS/Wave Defence
Review Code Provided by Relic
Quick Take:
Company of Heroes combat remains great fun, but Final Stand is too repetitive, too bare-bones and far too expensive for what it offers.
I hesitate to call things cash grabs these days, but Final Stand does have the vibe of something conjured up in a meeting at Relic HQ as a way to squeeze extra cash out of Company of Heroes 3. There’s very little that’s new in terms of assets or even gameplay mechanics – most of it just remixes existing stuff with a few UI changes here and there. It doesn’t mean the action isn’t fun, but it does call into question the price tag. £24 is a lot – even if you get the 20% discount for owning Company of Heroes 3, which brings it down to £19.
Here’s what to expect: pick your faction from the four available and then choose from one of just five maps, which appear to just be chunks of the regular skirmish maps. After that, select a difficulty and prepare to defend yourself against 12 waves of incoming enemy forces who have a grudge against your general existence. If they manage to destroy your HQ, it’s game over. Should you prevail, it’s time to break out the fancy ration packs and have a celebration.
This mode strips out base-building altogether – all your units are built from the barracks, which is bloody impressive when you start deploying tanks and other artillery. Where are they keeping them in that tent? This leaves you to focus purely on positioning your forces and choosing what to build and when.
Well, kind of. At first, you only get a couple of unit choices, but as the match goes on, each wave gives you a chance to choose between some upgrades, either in the form of abilities, perks or new units. Do I want an artillery barrage I can occasionally unleash or a smoke field that will help me hold the line? Will I choose an anti-tank cannon, or a group of infantry to shore up my left flank? Do I need a quicker, more mobile truck that I can quickly shift from one side to the other, or something a little heavier that’s capable of just driving through shit? Increased manpower production or some other passive boon?
It’s a fun idea, having to build your forces through a mixture of strategy and luck. However, there isn’t enough unit variety in Company of Heroes 3 to make it work as well as it should. Final Stand contains all the units found in the DLC as well, but even then, after a couple of matches, you’ve seen everything a faction has to offer.
Likewise, the gathering of resources via taking over territory has been tossed out the nearest window in favour of getting a set amount of everything trickling in. Some perks and things you select mid-match can affect the rate, but you aren’t worrying about marching out to annex territory.
Every few waves, you face off against one of the 36 boss variants, which is a nice way of saying it’s one of the game’s units with buffed stats and an attitude problem the size of a small country.
The game claims it boasts 18 dynamic events, although I’m still not entirely sure what constitutes an “event” because nothing ever jumped out at me as one. The only one that stood out was a wave full of tiny Goliaths that rolled in like an RC car parade, which was kind of cool. As for the other events, it really just means the random airstrikes and artillery barrages and other stuff that can be called in. I didn’t clock these as “dynamic events” because they felt like they were part of the regular waves.
I found the AI to be notably dumber than it was in the main game, happily stopping in wide-open areas to take potshots while ignoring the perfectly reasonable cover right next to them. In fairness, this style of AI – which mostly just moves forward and back on somewhat predefined routes – does suit the wave-based combat, but I’d still like at least some semblance of self-preservation.
The game’s trailer also makes this standalone expansion feel bigger than it really is. The population cap is 100, so that usually means a few infantry squads and two tanks. It means the scale feels off, lacking the size you’d want from something like this.
After 12 rounds of chaos, you can also opt to keep going in Endless Mode. There’s not much to say here: it keeps going until you die or get bored.
Whether you manage to live through all 12 rounds or not, perk points will be dropped into your personal bank account. These are tied to each faction and can be spent on permanent upgrades such as improved unit health, unlocking extra abilities for the prebuilt outposts on each map or opening up an add-on for your HQ. None of the additions massively alter how a faction plays or anything, but they give you a gradual power bump for those higher difficulty settings.
Oh, and that brings me to a weird thing: the British faction can’t unlock all their perks before they hit max perk points. That’s weird, because other factions can. Did somebody forget how to math?
In the game’s description, Relic calls this a “roguelite wave-defence” game. Yes, sure, on a technical level this qualifies because it has meta-progression and you’re trying to make it to the end of the 12 rounds in a single run, but it feels more like just trying to cash in on the term. It’s a roguelite in the same sense that a Tiger tank is just something the Germans used to get from A to B.
Should you feel like backup is required, you can form a much smaller version of the Allied Powers, or the Axis if you’re in a dark mood, I suppose. Anyway, there’s a co-op mode that supports two players – a little disappointing since Company of Heroes has previously allowed up to four players. As always, having a pal come along does make things more fun, although there’s little more to say about it.
When it all comes together, it does capture one of the greatest moments of the core game: the last stand, the manic moment where it’s you and just a few of your boys holding off seemingly impossible odds and somehow winning the day. Logic says no, sheer fucking stubbornness says otherwise. You get plenty of that here, especially when you’re desperately trying to get an anti-tank weapon across the map in time to stop a Tiger tank rolling through your territory like it’s decided Blitzkrieg is a life choice. The higher you ramp the difficulty, the more intense these scenarios become.
But the downside to dramatic last stands is that they do lose their dramatic quality when they keep happening. It’s not the last stand when it’s the 15th one you’ve played in a row. Point is, this is a fairly repetitive gameplay style, mixed with fairly repetitive choices between rounds.
In Conclusion…
The problem isn’t whether Final Stand is fun: it is. The issue is the context of its release. It feels more like a free update for the core game, or at most a £5-10 add-on.
People worked hard on this add-on and had to get paid, but that doesn’t stop it from looking like an asset-flip on the customer end. £24 buys a standalone expansion chock-full of reused units and maps, a perk system and some co-op. That’s difficult to justify when the same money can buy entirely new games.
Going back to Final Stand, it strips away a lot of the tactical depth of the core game and doesn’t replace it with anything substantial. It’s the same units and the same fundamentals repackaged across five new battlegrounds, but with dumber enemies, a smaller sense of scale and a handful of new mechanics that don’t feel fully fleshed out. It’s fun for a while, but that fun simply doesn’t last long enough to justify the buy-in.
