The greatest strategic game of all time, or just a few
new battles?
With Close Combat, Atomic created what most consider to be the most realistic and in-depth strategic war game of all time. It tracked statistics such as morale, experience, and leadership ability for every single soldier you had control of. Units also reacted with unsurpassed realism - a soldier who was being fired upon may return fire, panic and ignore orders, or run away altogether. In fact, Close Combat was much closer to a war simulator than a war game. After all, war is not a game.
Close Combat was a game unlike any other. Instead of controlling soldiers who obey every order unquetioningly and immediately, like in Command and Conquer or WarCraft, you control soldiers who behave like real soldiers. If you give them an order to move to a certain location, they will take the safest route they see fit, and they will avoid dying at all costs, even if it means disobeying your orders. It accurately portrayed the battles that followed the Allied landing on the Normandy beaches, all of the way to St. Lo, but it did it at the platoon level. Most games aren't that detailed.
When a sequel to Close Combat was announced early this year, the newsgroups were flooded with suggestions, speculations and rumors. Some reported new units, such as flamethrowers while others suggested multi-storey buildings. All this helped to build tremendous hype, but could Atomic really top Close Combat?
Now, some ten months later, the verdict is in. Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far (ABTF) tops the original Close Combat in all respects, and it is everything Close Combat veterans were hoping for and more.
ABTF didn't follow the example of Close Combat by simulating one of the greatest military campaigns of all time; instead, they chose a lesser known operation, Operation Market-Garden, which involved capturing five key bridges in The Netherlands. I believe this is because Atomic realized that fighting battle after battle in hedgerows was just plain boring. The Operation Market-Garden plan was to land airborne units with parachutes and gliders (the allies didn't make the same mistake twice - they were dropped in daylight) and take control of the bridges so the XXX Corps with its mighty tanks (which fought like sickly little girls compared to the German panzer divisions) could push through and clean up along the way. Your mission is to make this plan work, which relies heavily on your ability to defeat the Germans in a timely fashion.
The core of ABTF is very much the same as Close Combat, with a few important changes. The maps which were originally tile-based with pre-defined line-of-sight (LOS) barriers were tossed out in favor of 3D-modeled maps where LOS depends on the elevation of the attacker, the barriers, and the target. If something blocks the path of your soldiers sight, they won't fire. This also means that buildings can now be at any angle, as opposed to Close Combat where the bottom of the buildings always ran parallel to the bottom of the map. This makes a difference because of the positioning of windows.
Another new feature in the buildings is multiple storeys. To accomodate this as simply as possible, Atomic was forced to compromise the realism - all units are assumed to have the LOS advantages of the top floor of the building, but the defensive capabilities of the bottom floor. This eliminates the need for stairs, and a method for mounting them. The only exception to this rule is anti-tank (AT) guns (not bazookas, only large, immobile guns), which are always assumed to be on the bottom floor for obvious reasons. Atomic made the game even more realistic by keeping terrain and building damage consistant from battle to battle. This means that the wall you pelted with three mortars in one battle will be useless to you when you try to hide behind it in the next battle, which forces you to plan in advance a bit more.
ABTF also adds another feature to campaigns and operations ("mini"-campaigns) that make the game far more fun to play. You are no longer just given troops to use, you must use your requisition points to "buy" the troops you want. These include only the troops that would have been available at the time. If you are using airborne troops, you can't requisition tanks, no matter how many points you have. Your troop selection also depends on what country you are fighting as. The allies, comprised of the Americans, the British, and even the Polish to an extent each have their own advantages. The Americans have .50 caliber machine guns, assault teams, and BAR teams (which carry a Browning Automatic Rifle and are better than the smaller British Bren teams in my opinion), but the British have a large selection of tanks and a nice little 17-pound AT gun (that's the shells that weigh 17 pounds, not the guns). The Poles have the same things as the British airborne do for the most part, minus some units.
The new units in ABTF are impressive, to say the least. The best addition in my opinion are the flamethrowers. These can come in the form of assault engineers, tanks, and half-tracks. If you can get these weapons near a building packed with infantry without being killed you are bound to annihilate a good percentage of the enemy soldiers, and make the rest of them wet their pants and panic. These give the allies a far better chance of destroying German panzers than with bazookas (often ineffective), AT guns (immobile, a.k.a. sitting ducks), and plain infantry (I have destroyed several German tanks by waiting for them to get close enough then ordering infantry to lob their grenades at the tank, but you have to survive long enough to do that). They're also just plain cool to watch! Other new units include the British Bren (4 men with 1 Bren gun and 1 Sten gun), the British Vickers (.303 caliber machine gun that is far more common than the .30 caliber machine gun in Close Combat), and some cool new tanks. Some tanks and half-tracks are now armed with either a mortar or a flamethrower instead of the main gun.
If there is one thing that a good portion of Close Combat players didn't like about the original game, it was the manual. For the most part, I agree that it focused too much on the history of the campaign than the actual game. That's why I was glad to see that the manual for ABTF fixed that problem by describing both in-depth. The manual is well-written, easy to understand, and entertaining.
If I was unaware that Close Combat ever existed, I'd readily say that ABTF is the perfect strategic war game, but I know that sometime in the future it will be topped. However, for the most part this game is flawless, and it is one of the most entertaining games I've ever played. This game is not just for history-buffs, it is for anyone with an interest in military strategy. It even has an option to not show the dead bodies for the sake of children and pacifists.
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 SRP: $49.99 |