izigame.me

Telling people to ignore negative critique is normally a tad condescending but in this particular case I have to say that I genuinely do not understand what exactly people are expecting when they complain about certain things.
TL;DR: The game is, honestly quite excellent. Its a bit rough around the edges here and there; but the core game loop is better than all previous entries in the series and the performance is also far better than most released games in the past decade or so.
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The points I have been seeing:
The graphics are bad: Are they? How so? They seem fine to me. The textures look at or near the quality in the screenshots on the store page; maybe there's some more bugs on specific hardware? If so I'd probably report that as it seems unintentional. Is there a desire for more god rays? More fancy shadows? More bloom? Motion Blur? I really don't know what the ask is here.
What I did notice is that the performance seems to be far better than any previous entry. 144 FPS without any dips or drops is a pretty rare and cool thing to see. Maybe the graphics don't look like Atomic Hearts but I can't say I care much when the game runs smooth like butter.
The game lacks features: What features? This is usually done in comparison to COH2, but as I recall, COH2 launched with only 2 factions and only a single campaign with just minor little missions for the other faction. They then trickled in other modes and factions as dlc for 10-20 bucks a pop. There are also more maps than the launch of COH2 as well; What exactly is missing here?
Most posts seem to neglect mentioning anything. I suppose the only things I'd say that I actually noticed were a page for profile edits and some minor quality of life aspects such as game recordings or player names. There's also no progression system but, again, I'm not really sure why these are so important that they ruin the entire experience, these all seem, extra to me.
The sound design is bad: The sound design is "realistic" (at least according to the devs) which means that its not going to sound like a movie. Its going to sound real, its going to pop and crackle, and it isn't going to have the oomph (except the stukas apparently). Which, yeah, I enjoy the more boom boom pow than the crackle, but I don't really see how that warrants a negative review. I know there have been some people whose sound quality was defaulting to "low" and making the game sound like tin can pasta; but apparently that's an easy fix so /shrug.
I wouldn't mind a more hollywood sounding experience, I like the extra big thundering boom noises and massive over the top explosions a bit more than the realistic sort of vibe they seem to be going for here; but I can't say that should warrant a negative review, seems petty.
The UI is bad: This seems subjective to me. If you want to cram the entire set of menu buttons onto a tiny window that takes up less screen space than a steam notification I mean, I guess? It seems perfectly servicable to me. I think the thing to really look at is UX and besides the kind of fuggly social menu, the number of clicks required to perform certain tasks is properly minimized and the only thing I can't seem to find is a profile editor. You can click twice and get into a game and the in-game UI is straight out of COH2 but with more open space to see the actual game so, huh?
There are definitely UX improvements to be made (The way to cancel constructions wasn't immediately obvious to me, likewise upgrades (in a few instances I struggled to find it until it was literally too late to cancel)); additionally map pings don't seem to be particularly noticable (very hard to spot and hear) but maybe this will wind up being better after I play with it more, who can say.
The game is buggy: I can't speak to this one. In my time in the betas and alphas as well as at full release I have not experienced much if any noticable bugs, the only time I saw anything break would be vehicles bouncing like its a gmod corpse. But honestly, I find those sorts of things funny so I don't really know if they're worth complaining about. IF your game crashes or has weird issues, just report a bug and the devs will probably get back to you on it. The game seems about as stable if not more stable than coh1 and coh2 so, again, might just be my machine.
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If you notice, there seems to be one particular thing lacking from most of the negative reviews. And that's actually discussing the gameplay. You can probably guess why.
I've been around the COH franchise long enough to remember all of the design faults and issues with both balancing and design and the gameplay critiques from both of the oldies. And I am beyond impressed with the way that COH3 seems to have taken all of that feedback into account in their design. One good example is that of COH2's vehicle balancing. The design choices of the game meant that light vehicles had far less effectiveness in the long term due to the larger amounts of heavy armored units. Leaving early games fairly vehicle dry and late games front-loaded with armor. COH3 solves this by making light and medium units king and giving access to them almost immediately with the efficiency to actually stick around in conflicts and not just get torn apart as soon as the game enters mid. Another great example would be pacing, COH1 and COH2 were always slow to get started and basically had a lot of players who would just try to sit and turtle for 8 minutes. COH3's map design and pacing are much, much quicker, making for snappier combat encounters and more emphasis on using everything in your tool kit just to hold positions and cover ground; the game feels better for it.
There are other things, but I'm not exactly amazing at describing them, suffice to say the experience feels like an improved upon version of everything that game before and targeting of the exact pain points you might have had.
All of the factions also play and feel particularly unique (unlike in COH2 where the two starting factions basically played identically). There is an absolute gem of a game here and it saddens me to see so many people railing on it for, honestly petty reasons.
Oh, also, workshop support day1 is pretty neat too.
The only real thing I can critique here is the price, 60 bucks feels a tad too steep; somewhere around the 40-45 mark would probably fit better. But then again I don't really know what sort of game I'd describe as worth 60 dollars anyways, so that might also just be a nitpick.
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There's definitely polish points to be made, certain things like player names would be nice to have and I wouldn't mind some progression paths; but this lack of polish doesn't really hinder the experience. The game runs amazing, the game plays amazing, I wouldn't give it an A+ but I definitely wouldn't give it an F either. I think a B- is probably fair in the game's current state.
If the game did not receive any additional updates, I would probably still recommend it, which is why I just, do not understand the negativity. It seems entirely fickle. But I suppose I also don't put a ton of emphasis on presentation when I decide if a game is good or not. How it looks or how it sounds doesn't matter as much as the core experience to me. And that core experience here is something I think anyone who is a fan of RTS games can get behind.