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Combat Mission Series
Posted:
21/3/03 by maroule
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 The Disappearing Art of War
It is with the trepidation of an entranced lover that I approach the task of reviewing the Combat Mission series (‘Beyond Overlord’, BO, and ‘Barbarossa to Berlin’, BB) to a limited yet knowledgeable readership of about 9. Let me quickly drop all pretence of objectivity and state the obvious: what we have here are simply the best computing wargames ever made. That’s mostly all, thank you, good night.
Now on the small issue of why. As a 12 years old often home alone, I was left with a lot of time. Was it just that, the innate sadness of an only child locked in the basement, or was it rather my raging megalomania and natural anal-retentiveness? Whatever the cause, when wargames came to me (under the form of “the Battle of Yorktown”, distinctively crap and long since disappeared), I was instantly smitten. I therefore immediately invested a good part of my social life carefully placing and shuffling around small cardboard pieces on coloured maps, alongside like minded nerds (most of whom earn today much more than I do). Tremendous hobby, loads of good times, few sex opportunities.
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| Big cat at Sunset |
Few years later, computers got in the frame, offering a seemingly perfect answer to two inherent wargame problems : the lack of opponents at flexible times, and the complexity of rules/combat resolution. Yet, despite high hopes, many hard-core wargamers (‘grognards’) were left disappointed. It seemed an infinite variation of quality ‘war oriented games’ could be created, covering all angles and scales, from very global -MOO, Civilisation- to more local –RTS galore- to sub tactical turn based, as the excellent Jaded Alliance and Fallout Tactics. While some appealed to wargamers, none qualified as a ‘proper’ wargame. If there was some solace to be found in the Steel Panther or Panzer Campaigns series, they quickly ran out of breath, like a gauloise chain smoker ending the Tour de France (notice I’m on a secret mission to squeeze in as many French clichés as I can). Quality PC wargames went from scarce to almost non existent because of the ‘big game imperative’. The game industry indeed got stuck on the following circle : increasing budgets to cover both increasing development cycles and marketing costs (to fight for top shelve space), call, in return, for games with increasing sales, i.e. reaching large audiences cutting though different gaming populations. Since deeming the wargame market a ‘niche’ would still be way too flattering, none wondered the plummeting interest from major publishers.
Breaking the wave
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| The steppe is yours |
Which is why ‘Combat Mission : Beyond Overlord’ (CMBO) caused such a shock when it came out in 2000. It seemed to solve the paradigm. Its game play was simple enough to appeal to non grognards, yet had the depth needed to entrance aficionados. It was in full 3D, quite pretty, broke the dreaded hexagon straight jacket, and a zooming range from the overall view to the first person perspective. It was done on a budget yet took wargames out of the ghetto. Might have rabid WWII fanatics, coding in their kitchen, actually managed to square the circle, pondered the game industry?
CMBO later gave way to Barbarossa to Berlin (CMBB), published in 2002, “raising the wargaming bar even higher with its pitch-perfect, ultra-polished improvements to an already great game” (GameSpot). CMBO covers the Western Front from June 44 onwards, CMBB the Eastern Front and the whole war, from the summer 41 surprise blitzkrieg to the smoking ruins of Berlin in 45.
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