Combat Mission Cold War Reviews

Excellent game

This is Combat Mission. But... make no mistake. The 2000 one. With ton of "trust the devs things they claim" "semi-upgrades" to the original engine. Which are (? -were used to at least) paid for at Battlefront. I know, I used to buy them all until around second battlepack for Black Sea. Then I finally let myself accept things as they are. That somehow action-oriented titles like Assault Squad 2 do things much better than Combat Mission. Why? Because there is one rarely spoken of aspect to the series. Let me throw it out the window: It is not really simulating things. Like, almost at all. All it does -it pretends it does fancy milsim techy things you root for. In a way that made the young adult me in 2000 get very excited. But that was loong time ago. And they have not moved forward. Calculations? All the movement is on a small 2-meter or so spaced grids with vehicles lerping between the nav points. All the hit locations are dicerolls. Nothing is truly simulated. You can ride a 60 degree slope across in a top heavy vehicle and it won't roll. Because there are no actual working physics in the game. Only said dicerolls. All the terrain features are grid based. No smooth-curved terrain features, no smooth roads, fields, only 45 degree ones like in hex based titles from 1996. Or recently Armored Brigade I/II. Which is IMO fine in that series as the Finnish studio aims at certain retro aesthetics. Not here. Not after 25 years of development of the franchise. Because then the retro look in here is not justified, is a liability in attracting new customers. Graphics? The engine, with it's botched implementations of newer and newer versions of graphic pipelines (ducttape it! yaaay!) even after said "updates" simply can not handle modern amount of polys and game entities on screen; what was apparent around Red Thunder is now obvious and painful to watch. Slideshows. On high end rigs. Not because of the things diehard fans will tell you are going on, but because of bottlenceks in the overal framework. UI? The UI that was designed in March of 1999 for 4:3 15' screen and then work on UI was wrapped up. Well, at least it's how it feels like. Overall with the series and CMCW especially you have something that is actively killing the fading good memories of the prime in the series (Barbarossa, Afrika Corps). Given the past of Battlefront and the vast disdain for modern Wargame-style deck&rush silliness RTS titles I strongly hope the new publisher will revive what is now decomposed corpse with haphazardly put on makeup that they sell you here but newcomers, be warned. Especially at this price.

Great game, the most realistic tactical simulator out there. Except guys in exposed in cupolas etc on armored vehicles die like flies, not realistic.....