Article Type: Preview
Article Date: July 15, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: G.I. Combat
Category: Continuous Real-Time Strategy
Developer: Freedom Games
Publisher: Strategy First
Release Date: Released
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Remember Atomic Games? Remember Talonsoft? Chances are, if you were a computer wargamer in the 90s, you spent a good deal of time with at least one of their products, and probably with quite a few. They’ve both faded away, but veterans of both companies came together to form Freedom Games, and G.I. Combat is their first product—and we’ve gotten our grubby paws on an early beta.
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Grenade!  |
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| Lying in wait |
It’s hard not to call G.I. Combat the next in the Close Combat line. A real-time squad level wargame that models each soldier’s morale and motivations, where the player gives orders to the squads, teams, and vehicles and then watches to see if they’ll obey sounds pretty familiar. G.I. Combat is set in Normandy, just like two of the Close Combat outings. The command interface will seem familiar too, with options to Assault, March, Cautious Advance, Fire, Defend, and Pop Smoke. Selecting them gives you a colored bar to move about and click to assign a team of soldiers an order.
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| Plotting an assault path |
The first obvious difference, though, is the 3-D terrain and soldiers. Swept into the dustbin is Close Combat’s top-down view, in which your soldiers crawled around like tiny ants. Visuals are now served up by a spinney-rotatey 3-D engine, which lets you move from the top-down perspective of Close Combat down to a soldier’s-eye view down on the ground. As you can see from the screenshots, the game engine serves up a solid dose of pretty terrain and soldiers. The trees fade out of the way well when you get close to them, and, impressively, the tank’s treads move correctly with the vehicles, changing speeds for turns and keeping pace with the tank’s rate of motion over the ground. Soldiers look appropriately dirty as they crawl, walk, or run, and have the animations you’d expect for throwing grenades, firing their weapons, and scanning the horizon.
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| The first-person point of view |
Those soldiers are armed with dozens of varieties of weapons to deploy over maps that are realistic depictions of actual locations in Normandy (look at the official G.I. Combat FAQ for the complete list). Supporting them are an equally large assortment of armored vehicles, including such oddities as the French Somua tank!
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| Tanks! |
Offmap support allows for artillery ranging from 81mm mortars up to battleships, and close air support ranging from P-51s and A-20s, to the more bizarre option of Me-262s. Scenarios center around the objectives you’ve come to know and love: killing the enemy and capturing victory point locations. The AI does a competent job of fighting in the one scenario included with the beta, reacting to flanking moves and generally beating up on your intrepid previewer. Watching the battle from the soldier’s point of view is often pretty scary in and of itself!
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| Pinned down! |
The preview also includes a complete scenario editor. Much like the editors in the Close Combat series, this lets you specify the force levels for both sides, objectives, and starting areas. At this time, the enemy force in these scenarios seems to be pretty passive, and attempts to set up any form of antitank engagement resulted in a computer-freezing crash—problems that will doubtless be rectified well before the game ships, but that prevented the provision of any nifty screenshots of burning tanks. On the bright side, the editor should allow players to make up just about any battle they please.
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| Playing with the editor |
The full game is also slated to support multiplayer between two players over the Internet or a LAN, presumably allowing players to battle through the campaign as either side. Major successes or failures will have correspondingly major effects on the progress of the campaign. Just exactly how that works isn’t yet clear, though the party invitations to the British, Commonwealth, and other non-American Allied forces seem to have been left out. Maybe in the next game? The only other real gripe visible in the beta is that the view system can be clumsy at times, though that’s something that may well be tweaked into shape between now and G.I. Combat’s release.
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| Initial deployment |
It’s hard not to think of G.I. Combat as “Close Combat Mission”, the love child of Close Combat and Combat Mission. Both of those titles are good games in their own right, and the fusion of them should prove quite playable as well. Look for our review when it comes out this fall!
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| Soldiers cautiously advance across a road |
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