 With Close Combat: A Bridge Too
Far, Microsoft follows up on the success of last year’s Close Combat, a
game that covered the Normandy campaign from D+1 to the breakout at St. Lo. This time
it’s Operation Market-Garden, the overly ambitious and ultimately doomed brainchild
of Field Marshal Montgomery. In September 1944, with the Germans reeling and the Allies
closing on the Reich’s borders, Montgomery planned to attack with the British XXX
Corps on a narrow front across the canal-and-river laced Dutch countryside, with the
ultimate objective of seizing a bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem. If successful, the
Allies would be able to flank the Siegfried line, pour onto the Northern German plain, and
end the war by Christmas. But it was a risky plan, and depended much upon the Allies being
able to seize many large and small bridges along the attack corridor before the Germans
managed to blow them. Montgomery’s solution to this was to drop American, British and
Polish paratroopers behind enemy lines. Their job would be to surprise the Germans, seize
bridges and important objectives, and serve as "carpet over which the ground troops
could pass." If all went well, Montgomery promised, the XXX Corps would link up with
the British 1st Airborne Division in Arnhem within three days. All did not go
well, however, and Market-Garden became one of the great allied disappointments of World
War II. Close Combat: A
Bridge Too Far employs an improved version of Close Combat’s
real-time engine to recreate the campaign at the small unit level. You can play individual
scenarios, operations, or the entire campaign, and most scenarios will see you commanding
somewhere between ten and twenty squads, with perhaps a few tanks and guns thrown in. This
isn’t Panzer General; battles here are fought street by street, house by
house, ditch to ditch. And Close Combat 2, like its predecessor, does an exemplary
job of modeling WWII small unit tactics. Running out in the middle of the street or field
in this game is suicidal—your troops must move from cover to cover, provide covering
fire, use smoke, watch their ammo supply, and work flanks in order to succeed. This is all
the more entertaining because the game is real-time, and like Sid Meier’s
Gettysburg manages to combine the pulse-pounding action of real-time games with the
more cerebral pleasures of traditional wargames.
 Gameplay is fast and furious in CC2. Partially this is due to the
campaign itself—many of the scenarios are fought at close range in small towns, and
often the objective for the Allies is to capture a bridge before the Germans blow it. This
makes for some very anxious moments as the Germans desperately try to stave off Allied
paratroopers until a bridge can be demolished. Adding to the tension is the fact that your
troops often won’t do what you tell them to do—morale plays a major role in this
game, and if you leave a unit under fire for a long time they’re not likely to follow
orders for a while. Troops will also balk at the kind of John Wayne heroics you can get
away with in other games. If you tell them to charge across an empty field at a tank or a
machine gun they’ll get a little testy—the British troops under your command
will even go so far as to inform you that "you’re mad!" Credit Microsoft
for improving the interface since Close Combat as well— it’s much easier
to follow the action, much easier to tell what unit is doing what, and (most importantly)
much easier to see your units, who stand out nicely from the terrain without losing that
spiffy camouflage look.
Speaking of terrain, it looks great, especially
since Microsoft has added 16-bit graphics to the game. Units and especially tanks look
very stylish as well, and a large part of the game’s appeal stems from its
state-of-the-art graphics and sound. Like Sid Meier’s Gettysburg, you can
often tell how your unit is reacting to a given situation by aural cues—they’ll
scream "Blood!" (or "Das Blut" if German) if they’re feeling a
little down.
 Yet again, Microsoft has outdone themselves with an excellent manual; it
includes all you need to know to get you playing the game, loads of information—hard
and anecdotal—about World War II and Market-Garden, and a very helpful section on
tactics, which I strongly suggest you read before playing the game. There’s a nice
on-line help section as well, which includes a very good overview of the weapons and
vehicles you’ll be using and fighting against in the campaign.
Some of the new features that Close Combat 2
adds include the Battlemaker, a scenario editor that allows you to use the many maps in
the game (no map editor, though) and build new scenarios around them, and a much wider
selection of troops than in Close Combat—everything from reserve units to SS
vets to Polish paratroops. Perhaps most importantly, elevation now makes a
difference—buildings have multiple levels, and taking the tall ones is crucial in the
street-to-street combat that characterizes the game.
 There are still some things I’d like to see added to the game; there is no
provision for air support or off-board artillery, and the campaign game is not as
well-constructed as I’d have liked it to be. It is dynamic, you do have to manage
supply and resources, but you rarely get a glimpse of the big picture—it would have
been nice if Microsoft had included some sort of campaign map that gave you an idea of how
far XXX Corps had progressed and what effect your skirmishes were having on the campaign.
Overall, then, Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far
is a big improvement on the already excellent Close Combat. It combines the depth
and historical realism of traditional wargames with the excitement of real-time strategy
and sets them in a dramatic, tense context. The resulting game is nothing short of
excellent, my co-choice for wargame of the year along with Sid Meier’s Gettysburg.
I only hope that there’s a Close Combat 3—perhaps covering the Bulge, or
something a little different like Guadalcanal, or even better the campaign I’d really
love to see this engine brought to bear on, Stalingrad. Close Combat 2 has a lot to
offer to a wide range of gamers; one can only hope that serious wargamers will not be put
off by the game’s real-time engine and that Total Annihilation fans will not
shrink from the game’s historical aspects, because this game successfully capitalizes
upon the strengths of both.
--Rick Fehrenbacher |
