After years upon years of waiting, the newest iteration of Close Combat is finally with us. Close Combat: The Bloody First (CCTBF) follows the exploits of the US 1st Infantry Division. As a first for the CC series, you get to visit not only Normandy but also the deserts of Tunisia and olive groves of Sicily. Three theatres for the price of one! But is it a price worth paying? Has this latest installment kept that Close Combat magic, while finally updating the franchise for the 21st century? Let’s find out!
First, the basics. CCTBF is an infantry squad level Real-Time Tactics game (RTT), where you fight either a single 30-minute battle or in the case of the Grand Campaign, a succession of multiple 30-minute battles. Joining you are up to 14 infantry squads and a couple of special smaller teams, such as tank hunters or snipers. You can also bring three support units, which range from 30 caliber heavy machine guns to jeeps, tanks, and anti-tank guns.
CC games are all about infantry combat. Back in the day (the first CC was released in 1996) they were the first real-time tactical games to really take the psychological state of your soldiers into account, besides all the usual statistics on firing and penetration rates. It is also much harder to kill something or someone than in most other RTT games, so the breaking of morale is a very common route to both victory and defeat.
When the rest of the world moved to 3D graphics, the CC developers stuck with their increasingly creaky old game engine. Until finally, after the release of Close Combat: Gateway to Caen in 2014, they moved on to develop their own custom engine for the next generation of Close Combat.
My personal experience goes back to Close Combat 2, which released in 1997. After having experienced Dune 2 (which one of my friends described to me enthusiastically as ‘a weird combination of SimCity and Wolfenstein!”), and being blown away by the original Command & Conquer, Close Combat 2 was my first introduction to realistic RTT games.
To the high-school me, this was not a game. I treated it more like a WW2-themed ant-box. A very violent ant-box. Full of swarming nazis, and angrily buzzing tanks. It was amazing.
Currently, my main non-4x obsession is the WW2 RTS game, Steel Division 2, which I regularly play online with a group of friends. It’s a really good RTS that almost scratches that CC itch. Almost, but not quite. So I’m very happy to have my first review for eXplorminate be of CCTBF. Am I going to replace Steel Division 2 as my go-to WW2 game?
Close Combat, Just Like You Remember
My first impression of the game was: did they even change anything? The animation of the soldiers as they crawl through the fields, the understated-but-probably-realistic explosions, and tracers. The off-map fire support. The overpowered mortars. The German Panzers are both terrifying and brain dead. It all feels exactly the same. My sense of nostalgia was definitely indulged upon.
And then you shift the camera angle, and suddenly you realize: it’s indeed the same but in 3D! And it works wonderfully too. Especially the Line-of-Sight tool, which is an absolute virtual lifesaver.
Amazing Combat, When it Works
I had several battles where I was on the edge of my seat, carefully sneaking my infantry squads around enemy positions. Then I would maneuver everyone so that they could all open up simultaneously. Next, it was the symphony of gunfire erupting and the enemy squads’ morale breaking and then seeing them run away in a panic. When it works, the CC system of representing WW2 combat is still uniquely captivating. I’ll zoom out to get a birds-eye view of the battlefield, then I’ll zoom all the way in to watch one of my soldiers throw a hand grenade.
Because it is so hard to actually kill something, there is a sense of accomplishment when you manage to capture even the smallest hill or even a shack. I also felt a pang of genuine terror when my squads got caught out in the open by a massive artillery barrage, which is definitely not something that happens to me when my units are bombarded in a Steel Division 2 match.
Despite all the negatives that I’ll get into below, CCTBF is at times amazing.
Shellshocked
Gun and explosion sounds are nicely done. However, voice-overs are pretty much terrible. In the time you battle it out, the panicked screams of your men really add to the ambiance. But once you realize how limited it all is, every sense of immersion due to the sound-scape is gone. Eventually, you just start ignoring the yells of ‘I can’t take it anymore’, ‘Get me out of here’, and ‘We’re doomed!’. Besides repetitive, they’re also not very informative. As soon as a firefight breaks out, someone will start yelling that we’re doomed, irrespective of how doomed the fight really is.
Graphics are a mixed bag. I understand that CC is made by a small studio, and some maps look pretty good – particularly in Normandy. Sicily is average looking, while Tunisia looks mostly terrible, both because it’s a monotone color scheme and because that color scheme makes the maps really hard to read. And this last part is what is the main problem with the graphics. They’re bland to the point of making maps hard to read. When graphics start to impede gameplay, it’s a problem. I installed CC: Gateway to Caen just to see how they compare, and the hand-drawn maps of the previous iteration actually look better to my eye. The animations of the soldiers are another sore spot. They basically recreated the 2D sprite animations. This really is a missed opportunity to make the soldiers feel a little bit more lifelike.
Lonely Battlefields
Despite the fact that you get three vastly different theatres of war to play with, the game seems weirdly empty. The maps are quite small, and there are no sky-boxes (or is it ground-box?) to give you a feeling that the map is part of a larger countryside. Until a very recent patch, the area outside the map was pitch black, which felt weirdly disconcerting. There are no multi-story buildings. You’re fighting in three completely different theatres, but besides a couple of cool village fights in Normandy, the battles themselves don’t feel all that different.
The Grand Campaign is also just not very engaging. For each 30 minute battle, you can only bring a sub-set of your division. This also means that every battle you can choose to swap units out for fresh units. I had either too many units or too few battles to make unit conservation really important, as I always had enough units to start the next battle with fresh forces.
The after-action debriefings seem to be still in beta. Take this example which greeted me after a hard-fought battle where I advanced over a ridge and ended up taking roughly 2/3rds of the map, including most of the command points: “You achieved a minor victory, your casualties were lighter than expected. Not only did your attack fail, but the enemy pushed you back.” Uh, what?
When the maps are wide enough to flank, the battles can be quite a lot of fun. But some maps are weirdly narrow and long. For me at least, this always ends up in a long and rather boring shootout, until the AI randomly decides to do something dumb and gives up its defensive position. All in all, I’d say that 1 in 4 battles was great, the rest were average or just straight boring.
Close Combat, Just Like You Remember
While the move to 3D is generally for the better, the close adherence to the classical Close Combat interface and a general sense of jankiness is not. Icons are sometimes nearly identical, and even if not they’re still generally hard to read. Post-battle statistics are nonexistent. Crucial information such as how much ammo my mortars still have is hard to come by.
Tanks and other vehicles still seem just as clueless as in previous iterations. In one of my most tense battles, a German panzer drove right up through my lines. My anti-tank units were positioned incorrectly. I was completely defenseless, and I had to scatter my men to avoid a complete disaster. It was an amazing move. But unfortunately, it was also a rare example of where the AI, on accident, did something fun. Generally, tanks will just stand around, or seemingly randomly drive somewhere without infantry support. They will still absolutely wreck you though, which brings us to the next weakness…
Mortars, Mortars, Mortars
I read in a book recently that 70% of infantry casualties during WW2 were due to indirect fire such as mortars and artillery. So I guess it’s realistic that mortars are the way to play.
But it’s not exactly fun.
Mortars and artillery barrages are seriously overpowered, to the point where quite a few battles are ruined because of them. I would have a bunch of anti-tank guns carefully positioned (remember, you can only bring a maximum of three anti-tank support units), only to get them mortared to bits by uncannily accurate Germans in the first few minutes of the battle. The remaining battle consisted of Panzers randomly driving around the map shooting at my men (who can’t seem to deal with tanks even when they’re right on top of them) until my overall morale points went too low and the battle was lost. This was a crappy way to lose; it was frustrating and rather boring.
The other way around, I won quite a few battles by just bringing as much mortar support as I could and blasting all the guns and armored cars to bits as soon as I spotted them.
Conclusion
If you have good memories of Close Combat – as I am sure many of you will have – then CC:TBF is a fine new entry into the series. But it’s hardly a glorious return to form. The developers stated that their goal for this version was to introduce a new engine and replicate as much as possible the Close-Combat experience. And that they did. But time has moved on, as have expectations. I can forgive the bland graphics and terrible voice-overs. But the basic interface mistakes are one bridge too far for me.
If you’re looking for a fix of WW2 gameplay, Steel Division 2 is just a much better game in almost every aspect. With a little bit of sadness in my heart, that’s the game I’ll keep on playing with my group of WW2 nerds. Because I don’t want to end on a negative note, I’ll say this: I am absolutely looking forward to the next iteration of CC on the new engine. Here’s hoping they learn from their mistakes here.
TL;DR: It’s Close Combat, just as you remember it. For better or worse. There are too many bugs and too much jankiness for my liking, but when the game finds the right rhythm, it’s a blast. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t find it often enough to make Close Combat: The Bloody First worth my time. However, if you absolutely need a Close Combat fix, it might be worth yours.
You Might Like This Game If:
- You are a diehard fan of the Close Combat series
- You’re willing to wade through some of the bad to find some of the great
- You like mortars
You Might NOT Like This Game If:
- You are a diehard fan of the Close Combat series; you probably wanted more than this
- You need a visually-stunning experience
- You want a bug-free and improved experience
Benji played for a lot of hours on his PC that we don’t currently have specs for but will update this post once we get them. Until then, just know that it wasn’t a NASA computer and it wasn’t a potato, either.
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A new author for eXplorminate, Benji hails from the Netherlands and is a 4X and strategy game aficionado. Reviewing games is new to him, but we think he’s doing a great job already!