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Atomic Games's Close Combat series, now published by the
war-gaming veterans at SSI and Mindscape, continues with its
fourth title, Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge. Atomic Games
stands by an old adage by not messing with success; Battle of the
Bulge retains many of the interface and game-play elements of the
first three Close Combat titles; only the scenarios and geography
have changed.
For its latest installment, Atomic Games focuses the battles
(across several dozen campaign and individual missions) and
geography around the historical Battle of the Bulge. Players can
command American or German troops and control a variety of
forces, including infantry, snipers, machine ners,
and flame throwers, as well as order air strikes and artillery
deployment. Overall, the graphical detail of the terrain and
pyrotechnics are quite good, but some players may struggle to
locate the tiny units on the murky mud terrain or bright
white snow.
Computer-controlled artificial intelligence provides a
formidable challenge during the single-player game. Along with
the solo campaign, Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge offers both
an Internet multiplayer option and a complex scenario editor for
hours of additional playability. If you're a fan of the first
three Close Combat games or searching for an in-depth
simulation, check out Atomic Games's Close Combat: Battle of the
Bulge. --Doug Radcliffe
Review
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Close Combat took the wargame world by storm when it was
released in 1996. In addition to being one of the first wargames
to pick up on the burgeoning real-time strategy craze, Close
Combat was so bold as to cl to be a historically accurate
simulation of war. And while Close Combat's focus on the Normandy
hedgerows wasn't unprecedented, the game's style, which
emphasized infantry morale, was quite out of the ordinary. It's
little wonder that publisher Microsoft and developer Atomic Games
reprised the title twice. Now publishing through SSI, Atomic has
tried to make the magic last through yet another sequel and has
succeeded once more. Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge will
appeal both to Close Combat veterans and to those simply looking
for a good real-time strategy game with historical overtones.
The fourth Close Combat centers on the battle in which Hitler
threw his last reserves at the Allies in a desperate gamble to
shatter the Western Alliance and bring about a separate peace.
While the plan failed - it never really stood a chance - it did
make for a miserable Christmas of 1944 for thousands of GIs stuck
in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg.
Close Combat is a series of squad-level World War II
combat games that simulate the behavior of individual men and
vehicles. However, you control the games on a squad level, in
that you give orders to groups rather than to their individuals.
Yet the games keep meticulous track of each individual soldier's
actions and capacity to fight, and it's this excellent simulation
of soldiers' behavior that makes the series truly stand out. A
squad that takes too many casualties will eventually go to ground
and refuse to obey orders to advance and may even rout off the
battlefield. Unlike a traditional real-time game, you can't just
send your units off to slaughter and have them keep coming back
for more.
At heart, the fourth Close Combat is very similar to more
traditional real-time strategy games: You assign your units
various orders such as move, fast move, sneak, lay smoke, ambush,
defend, and fire by right-clicking the mouse, and you give your
units a target or destination by left-clicking. It's that simple.
The game keeps track of all your units for you, so you just
manage their various formations on the battlefield rather than
wallow in details like making sure a certain soldier is reloading
his mortar. The game's vast breadth of units is another key
feature, as all sorts of historical vehicles and unit types are
present, from single snipers and machine- teams to heavy
mortars, flamethrowing engineers, and Panther tanks. When the
units clash in combat, the effect is intense and never
cartoonish. Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge models warfare and
does a damn good job of it.
One of the problems with the campaigns in last year's Close
Combat III was that you didn't feel like you were influencing the
greater course of the war in any way by winning your battles.
This was only to be expected from a historical standpoint, as the
small sqauds depicted in the game could hardly hope to determine
the course of Operation Barbarossa. Nevertheless, the
single-player mode consequently felt like a set of
strung-together scenarios rather than a more cohesive and
meaningful campaign. Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge redresses
its predecessor's problem by implementing a strategic in
which you can move your forces and initiate battles. German and
American units can be moved around a of the Ardennes that
consists of more than 40 areas. When hostile forces coexist in an
area, combat occurs. Because the strategic is used to
determine supply, positional objectives become very important.
This new strategic element is well designed and has a great
effect on gameplay.
The strategic overview and the tense nature of the Bulge campaign
make the fourth Close Combat a pulse-pounding game that forces
you to do more than just fight the next battle. But the real
appeal of the game is the combat itself. Panthers race
up forested roads to engage American armor, bazooka teams lie in
wait in snowy Belgian hamlets, and even air and artillery strikes
are available to the commander trying to force that crucial
breakthrough, or prevent it. The fact that every battle actually
has relevance to the overall strategic situation makes the game
far more interesting than it would have been as a typical World
War II battle simulation. Like any successful sequel, Close
Combat: Battle of the Bulge doesn't merely rehash the features of
its predecessor, but adds to them.
However, Battle of the Bulge doesn't escape some of the problems
that cropped up in previous games in the series. The most notable
of its problems is the computer nent's artificial
intelligence, which can be downright abysmal when it's playing as
the Germans, especially in regard to the pathfinding of armored
units. In fact, the pathfinding can be so bad that it's pretty
much pointless for you to play as the Allies in any scenario that
requires the Germans to attack first; the computer is simply
incompetent on the attack. Fortunately, the computer is much more
capable on the defensive.
Close Combat III: The Russian Front also had a tendency to become
too focused on armor. Infantry units seemed unusually weak, which
encouraged you to bolster your forces with tanks whenever
possible. Battle of the Bulge avoids this problem by beefing up
the staying power of infantry, as well as by eliminating its
predecessor's unit-purchase system altogether. Instead of using
experience points to buy new units, you are given replacement
pools from which to choose units, and additional tanks won't be
available if a given formation already has its full complement.
The replacement pools make the game correspond more closely to
the actual campaign, and they are a solution to the Close Combat
III pitfall that eventually led to all-armor formations as the
game progressed, although the preset replacements hamper the
multiplayer mode, since you can't really customize your forces.
Battle of the Bulge also has a few strange order-of-battle
problems, such as ubiquitous flamethrower- and rocket-halftracks,
which were never so abundant in reality. Despite its general
historical accuracy, the Close Combat series has always played a
little loose with vehicle and ornce details. However, the
occasional historical inconsistency never really detracts from
the games: Just like its predecessors, Close Combat: Battle of
the Bulge is ultimately very enjoyable to play.
In fact, it's so fun that Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge will
prove to be one of those games that you'll fire up again and
again, and each time you'll come away having enjoyed yourself
tremendously. The new strategic element gives the fourth Close
Combat a whole new dimension that more than makes up for the weak
artificial intelligence and reduced multiplayer options. Some
historical warfare simulations are long on history and short on
fun. Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge has a dash of the former
and a huge dose of the latter. -- Bruce Geryk
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot
