The Combat Mission series had people taking notice.  It's a Turn Based Strategy (TBS) that isn't truly a classic style of TBS.  It is different, but not so much that it will transform the industry as evidenced in its mild popularity.  It has now had two follow up games that have done well but not mega-million sellers.  That is not to say that it isn't a breath of fresh air.  It is in fact a nice new flavor of TBS.  But don't worry, if you make traditional TBS games, don't pack it in and file for bankruptcy.  There is room for everybody.

The way that it breaks form the traditional TBS game is that you don't play continually through a battle.  You more or less plan out your moves before a step and sit and wait.  The game goes into a 60 second animation that shows how good or bad you planned.  For example, that tank you had going down the road starts getting shot at 10 seconds into the animation, it's pretty much toast.  There's no chance to save it or modify any actions.

At first, this can seem like a bad idea when looking at the negatives, but I think that it works in that it emphasizes how real war plans can go awry.  A general can't move his men in real time.  He can just give orders and back up orders and hope they're effective.  The game takes it a little further, too, as human unpredictability goes into the outcome.  Soldiers can get scared and run off, disobeying orders.  They can fall to their bellies when they should be storming a hill.  They won't sacrifice themselves as pawns for the sake of the queen.  There's more of a true human reaction than the average TBS.

Due to the unpredictability of the 60 second movie, you are forced to start over and try wholly different strategies.  Sometimes strategy changes based on what units you get.   If you don't have tanks (literal), you may not be able to aggressively attack.  Maps are varied as well.  You get high ground sometimes, and other times not so much.  Buildings are plentiful on some missions.  Other times, it's you in a wheat field.   Missions themselves push the need for multiple strategies as you may be asked to dig in or maybe aggressively take a town.

Missions are generally 15 turns, and are the bulk of what you'll play in CM.  That means that you only get a per mission story with no continuity to the next game/mission.  They do have what they call operations which are sets of missions with one continual goal.  I wouldn't call any of these campaigns.  They're plentiful but brief.  There ends up being a lot of gameplay value but the lack of a good overall story tends to leave a single player experience a little wanting.

The operations have some flaws.  (These tend to be in the missions, too, but they aren't as glaring.)  One example of this is feedback on winning.  You really don't know if you've won until the very end.  In a 15 turn mission, this isn't a huge deal.  You just replay the mission.  In a 90 turn operation, this can be frustrating.  I thought that I was doing okay in one operation only to find that I had mildly lost.  This didn't produce a happy feeling for me, and it also didn't make me want to replay the operation.  It instead made me want to play CM even less, preferring to look on my unplayed video game shelf pondering what to play next.

The operations are generally split up into a set of single missions.  Sometimes, you aren't quite sure of what will carry over from one mission to the next.  My guess was that this was put in to help players understand the unpredictability of war.  That's a good sentiment, but it also puts a shade in front of the mechanics of the game.  Ultimately, this is a strategy game.  If you don't have an idea how to win, trial and error becomes the mode of action.  Most people would prefer not to play this way.  And making the player plan out strategies is the key to this game and many war games.  They are games to be played.  Immersion is not the objective really, because if someone gets drawn into the reality of war, they won't enjoy the experience.  War is hell.

That is not to say that this game is not fun.  It's just a flaw that keeps the game from achieving superiority in the gaming world.  There are many things that work in this environment.  It tends to pull away from many strategy games in that you get a many and varied types of units.  It feels like you pretty much get every type of soldier and vehicle that existed in land warfare back in WWII.  You also get many of these units on the map. 

The large group of men you are given in the beginning (usually) and are meant to be protected but overall objective is to attack.  This becomes important because unlike other strategy games, you can't make more.  It's a little more like Myth in this way.  You may get more due to wrinkle in the operation, but there is no factory, fort, upgrades, etc. that will allow the player to make more units.

The many and varied units which you can place on the map keep you interested when things start to drag after playing a long time (as with many other games.)  All of the research done on the military to make these units was quite impressive as well.  When I deployed my units, it gave a very realistic feel to that part of the strategy.  You couldn't take down a tank with a machine gun, per se.  If anyone cracks open the huge manual, I'm sure that they'll be surprised at what depth and great length the developers went to making this game accurate from a fighting standpoint.

The manual itself is quite nice, but very wordy.  You'd think this would be a good thing, but using more graphics and screenshots would have made it clearer.  It's a lot easier to have an arrow pointing to a certain button that needs to be pushed than trying to describe the same process in words (says the man who uses no screenshots in his reviews.)

Graphically speaking, this is a mixed bag.  The map and units are fairly easy to read as you can magnify the size of the units in order to get specifics or make them look more proportionate to their surroundings.  There are zooms, different view angles, rotations and pans that help you get into any certain vantage point.  However, the battlefield is way too big for the camera.  This makes sense from a game play perspective, but with a slow pan and rotate, it can be a bit of a pain to be plodding the camera around. 

It seemed that CDV had a nice, but imperfect 3D engine that they wanted to wield as accurately as they could.  Upon further review, it appeared that they understood that would be overall impossible.  Hence, they added some components as to not frustrate the potential players.  Not a bad compromise, but its more of an advanced duct tape type of approach.

The GUI doesn't add any extra flare to matter.  It definitely shows its age as well.  Very simple buttons and non-intuitive hot keys tend to round out the medium.  It, again, isn't terrible just a bit weak and plain.

You don't really get much information or commentary as you play the game, except in the beginning when you read the briefs.  The saves aren't well organized either. As someone who saves under multiple file names for fear of corruption, I want there to be some easy system to figure out which file that I saved last.  Combat Missions didn't provide that. 

Graphics and GUI's tend to paint the picture of the overall game.  It is fun.  It has depth.  It isn't polished.  It's a game with great mechanics and a unique approach to TBS.  However, it's not revolutionary enough to overwhelm its lack of presentation.  A good game for sure, but short of great.

Recommended: No