Close Combat III: The Russian Front

The Good
All CC games are great. They might have a few problems here or there, but in general they're all fully researched, wonderful to look at, and easy and fun to play. But it's important to keep in mind that the engine is really about a handful of units, and that's all it's good at.

The Bad
So what the heck was Keith thinking when he decided to use this engine to drive a game about the entire Soviet front? This is a war that took four years and killed millions of people, and you're going to represent that in a unit based game? Come on! It's worse, there's only what, 13 maps, each about a mile by a mile? So 13 square miles out of millions and millions of them is supposed to be reasonable?

Then add to this that the "plotline" is the same every time. My units wiped out legions of the enemy every battle (once they get good at their jobs), yet it still ends up in the same place every time no matter what.

Artillery, included after endless excuses about why they couldn't possibly put it in the game, finally appeared. However it was completely hard wired into the mission - not on call - and thus largely useless. Perhaps 1 in 5 missions RT would end up hitting something, typically it was aimed where nobody was. The game was better off without it.

Like the earlier versions, the game also included a system of replacements and upgrades to your units. You win points by doing well in combat.

However they then ruined this too. At the end of every campaign you'll have some damage, but you start the next scenario with only 10 points - enough typically to fix one bit of damage (like a frozen engine). Now this normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, but in later parts of the game if you do really well you'll win the entire scenario in one mission, and never get any of those points. As a result by the end of the game you have almost nothing left, unless you deliberately lose missions!

By the end of the game the entire thing is decided entirely by the armor. There is no balance here. No matter city or fields, infantry quickly gets cut apart and the armor slugs it out and that's that.

But by FAR the biggest problem is the handling of the armor itself. Basically the guns appear to have strengths exactly equal to the calibre, so the huge guns on the Soviet tanks blow away anything the Germans field. In reality these guns had very low velocities and thus weren't all that tough, but not so in this game. Another example is that the German 75 on the Panther was just as good as the 88 on the Tiger, due to its faster shot. Yet in this game the Panther has perhaps one or two missions where it can survive, and after that the Soviet armor blows it away every time. This simply isn't right.

The Bottom Line
CC is one of the greatest series ever, but this is not the one to get!