Developer: Atomic Games; Publisher: SSI
Reviewed by Cat91 on 10/24/00

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First Impressions:

A rough day on the beach was about to get rougher. The lieutenant tried to burrow deeper in the sand behind the twisted I-beams of the tank trap as the mixed mechanized company dismounted from the landing ships behind him. A 75mm IG-18 gun high above controlled this area of the beach, unfortunately for him and his men, and from another bunker came the hornet's buzz of the dreaded MG-42, the German machine gun most feared on the battlefield. The lieutenant reached for the handset of his AN/PRC-10 radio. "Condor, this is Easy five-two, adjust fire, over!" A five-inch gun barrage from the destroyers out to sea would give the Jerry MG in the bunker something to think about. As he barked coordinates into the mouthpiece, over his shoulder came the booming crash of a Sherman's 75, the scream of the shell overhead making him flinch. The following satisfying explosion was accompanied by faint screams in the direction of the now-smoking IG-18. "Serves ya right, Uncle Adolf . . .."

I have followed Close Combat since CC2, the 1996 iteration that modeled the movie "A Bridge Too Far" and the attempt by airborne forces to take the route to Arnhem, Holland during late 1944. The first CC dealt with the 29th Infantry Division's march inward from the Normandy beachhead and is still an incredibly challenging game. Set in Europe in the Second World War, the four Close Combat games model personal, up close tactical warfare on the squad level, around forty soldiers per side on a relatively small map. If you know anything about Avalon Hill's old board game "Squad Leader" then you're in the ballpark. I was drawn to Close Combat because it models not just the weapons and the tactics-it models the men as well. The game uses an innovative, still unapproached psychological model for the soldiers that was designed by a behavioral psychologist-if you drive these men too hard they'll break and you'll get them killed, and lose the fight. This is not grand strategy. There are few logistical headaches, and we're just not concerned about the back-story or the politics. We're trying to kill the enemy and stay alive. Close Combat isn't for the squeamish, but it is Microsoft's gift to small-scale wargaming.

The first two games in the series were primarily about infantry combat-this was, and is, CC's strength. But wargamers like tanks. Wargamers clamored for more armor. In 1999 Atomic heard the cries of wargamers and came out with Close Combat 3-The Eastern Front, which modeled a grand-scale campaign in Russia; the first CC to leave Western Europe after D-Day, and relied heavily on tanks. Which in my mind destroyed game balance, as only German infantry have a prayer of taking on tanks since Soviet, British, and U.S. infantry generally had little antitank capability. Most CC gamers began to favor the Germans, who were tougher in the clinch. This attitude reached its zenith with CC4-Battle of the Bulge, released in early 2000, which I consider the nadir of Close Combat gaming. Taking place in the Ardennes in the winter of 1944, this game introduced the highly demanded strategic layer and airstrikes, but was again dominated by tanks. This, by the way is the only edition of Close Combat I don't own, but played the demo enough to hate it. I defaulted to the excellent community of third party addons for Close Combat 3, particularly the Tombstone Vietnam addon (http://closecombat.thegamers.net/Cc3Vietnam/); this addon serves up the most intense infantry firefights I have ever played in Close Combat, command-team observed artillery and air strikes, and great play balance.

Then SSI bought the Close Combat franchise from Microsoft. Gamers began to speculate. Gamers speculated even more when the movie Saving Private Ryan showcased the brutality of the Normandy landings in June 1944. And then Keith Zabaloui of Atomic confirmed gamer suspicions-CC5 was going to return to its Norman roots. Did it do the job? I got a package in the mail a few days ago. Let's take a look.

Graphics:

Don't believe the hype. Ignore the pundits. The CC series has been broadly the same since 1996, with incremental graphics differences. The games are 2d, with tiny sprite-animated soldiers prowling a top-down landscape. Trees and buildings are sprite-driven, and when soldiers enter buildings the roof disappears and you can see them moving around inside the building. In this Direct 3D age the pundits have blasted first Microsoft, now SSI, and always Atomic, for not going 3d. "Cease and desist!" this writer hollers. Look, the 2d graphics here get the job done more than handsomely. This game runs at 1024x768 on a mid-range system with all options enabled. You can see individual movements; explosions are bright, flashy and crisp, tracers fly all over the screen, aircraft flash by, tanks blow black exhaust in the air, smoke looks great. What more do ya want? For CC, the top-down perspective works. It gives the gamer a real crow's nest view of the battlefield, and the ability to plan tactics on the fly. It is akin to the old board games with none of their turn-based vices. That's right; gamers-CC is Real Time. The menus in CC5 are sharp and well done, and although many have bemoaned the lack of flash and dash .avi movies for goal making, other than the one at the very beginning, you don't need that extra stuff once you get into the gameplay. When your sprites get shot, they fall in pools of blood, too. This game is not for the young. It is very disturbing, as war should be.

Sound:

Top-quality. In the first two CC games, the designers went out and got sound-bytes of actual WWII weapons-the actual M-1 rifle, the actual MG-42 machine gun, et al., and incorporated them. CC3 saw the beginning of generic sounds, and the quality began to fall. When you can hear individual rounds pop off with an MG-42, which had a cyclic rate approaching 1000 rounds per minute, you know something ain't right. But in CC5 Atomic went home to its roots and got the sounds right again. At least, they feel right. I said above, the game is disturbing and NOT FOR THE KIDS. I wouldn't let anyone under 18 play Close Combat. A CC firefight is punctuated by screams as the soldiers die in huge explosions, or are cut down by machine-gun fire in the open. Sometimes their buddies will call a comrade's name. "Riley!" or "Brubaker!" as Riley or Brubaker gets shot down by the Germans. You hear your men's morale begin to stretch under sustained fire from overwhelming odds-they'll cry out, "I can't take it!" and tell you, "We need to pull back!" Lest we forget the horror that is modern war, Close Combat will make us remember. And at the same time, it delivers the challenge of a great tactical game.

Gameplay:

I've touched on this. CC5 continues the tradition of CC4 in only one respect: the strategic layer. The field of battle is the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, in the German rear area. Tare Green and Utah Beaches are the starting place. You move your forces into areas on the strategic map that will default to the local area map in the game. You assign air strikes, off-map artillery, and new to CC5-naval bombardment-to your battalions before moving to the game map. Your forces are battalion-size "force pools" that you can build your company-size combat team for the battle from. Your resources are finite, and if you get too many killed, when you get to harder battles you'll be short of men and equipment. This is the only way logistics impact you. Off the strategic layer, you enter the battle itself, position your forces, then take the map one position at a time.

Your men are modeled on real soldiers. Tell a lone infantry man to charge a machine gun by himself, and he'll tell you to stick it where the sun don't shine. But pin the enemy gun in place with a fire team, and work another up the gun's exposed flank, and you'll watch the men dive for cover, then throw hand grenades as they close, and envelop the bad guys in a withering blast of rifle and submachine gun fire. In the CC3 Vietnam mod, I made the mistake once of leaving an Australian infantry team in a covering position on a small hill, while I fiddled with two squads of ARVN Rangers pinned in a firefight in a rice paddy. Before I knew it, my Aussies were charging the Viet Cong guerillas who'd pinned down my ARVNs on their own initiative, without orders to do so. In CC5, I saw a squad of combat engineers from the 101st Airborne do the same thing, madly charging unbidden into the front door of a cathedral as a Browning Automatic Rifle team was getting slaughtered in the Rector's office in back, spraying the unsuspecting Sturmgrenadiers with liquid Napalm from their backpack flamethrower and turning the tide. Check out the aftermath in the screenshots. CC5 returns to the CC1 and CC2 tradition of fierce infantry firefights. Until CC5, my Close Combat fix was filled by the CC3 Vietnam mod, and in that mod I have seen some of the most withering firefights I ever thought possible; a cacophony of M-16's, AK-47s, M-60 machine guns, grenades, Claymore mines, M-79 grenade launchers, and the shouts and screams replicating the confusion and adrenalin rush that war is. CC5 shows us that 1944 France was just as mean as the Street Without Joy was in 1968. You'll become attached to individual soldiers throughout a campaign, and get to know them as virtual people, not "units"; each sprite has its own individual personality modeled in statistics similar to a role-playing game, gaining experience in combat, and decorations for bravery as he gets better. When you see them fall, you'll mourn their loss, and remember spots on familiar maps where memorable fights, and acts of incredible bravery happened in other games. As with all the iterations of CC, Atomic has tweaked the artificial intelligence in CC5, and the result is the best from-the-factory Close Combat yet. This one's a keeper, CC fans.

Overall Impression and Enjoyment:

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool CC fan. War, in my mind, should not be sanitized. While games like Close Combat should not be marketed in any way to kids, I believe war's horrors should not be lost on adults in demanding and challenging strategic gameplay. As General Lee said, should war lose its horror, we would become too fond of it. I play Close Combat for its attention to detail, its realism, the psychological model of the troops, and the tactical challenge. But I also cannot forget when I play that I once wore Army green, and that war is a deadly serious business, and brave men died once upon a time, in the real battles I re-fight in virtual time. In a way, we honor their memory, and their sacrifice, in games like Close Combat. Close Combat leaves enough to the gamer's imagination that, like a Hitchcock movie, it comes eerily alive in a way that 3dfx/Direct 3D gore-for-the-sake-of-gore could never capture in a thousand years. I hope Atomic stands firm, and resists the pressure to modernize the game engine. This is a classic that will never grow old.

Marketing Efforts Toward Women:

Nonexistent. I had an email conversation with Keith Zabaloui shortly after the release of Close Combat 3-The Russian Front, and he was shocked that any woman would play their game, and seemed to be of the opinion that we shouldn't, though he was glad I'd bought the games. Too bad. Women should play Close Combat; we'll fight all the harder against real war for the experience. The cardinal rule of battle is Know Thy Enemy.

The pressure is on Atomic to "modernize" the game. Frankly, I hope that instead, Atomic will continue its incremental improvements to AI and the sprite-based graphics, and bring the game into other time periods instead. With a minimal investment on SSI/Atomic's part, the game would work in time periods from 1879 to present day; Tombstone's Vietnam mod should be the pattern for future development. With existing resources and third party hacks, he has added 40mm grenade launchers, and given command teams the ability to control air strikes in much the manner as in real life, in a better fashion than in CC4 and CC5; he is an Army man and knows his stuff. If Atomic were to broaden CC by moving it into more modern conflicts such as the French Indochina War, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, or the Six Day Arab-Israeli War of 1967, wargamers will revive their interest in the franchise regardless of any 3-D eye candy. This is an excellent game franchise; I hope we see continued growth from it. There are so few franchises we can count on in gaming today. Perhaps Close Combat will be the one we can count on.