G.I. Combat
by James SterrettArticle Type: Review
Article Date: December 09, 2002
Product Info
Product Name: G.I. CombatCategory: Continuous Real-Time Strategy
Developer: Freedom Games
Publisher: Strategy First
Release Date: Released
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Love Child?
You’re doubtless familiar with Combat Mission, and most of you also remember Close Combat. Now imagine they have a night out on the town. They beergoggle each other, and youthful indiscretions result in their lovechild: GI Combat. But did GI Combat incorporate the best of its parents, or the worst, as it pits you against the enemy across the war-torn fields of Normandy?  |
| Shermans and infantry advance through the countryside |
The folks at Freedom Games have repeatedly shown themselves anxious to explain that GI Combat is not Close Combat 3D. In some respects, they are perfectly correct. GI Combat doubtless needed to be coded from the ground up. However, many of the staff of Freedom Games came from Atomic, and the pedigree shows. GI Combat has the same sensibilities as Close Combat. Players command their forces by squads or fire teams, the morale model is they key to the combat system, the hotkeys for issuing commands to your troops are the same. In some respects, it’s unfair to compare the two, yet the similarities are so great that I doubt any gamer can avoid noticing them. So, fair or not, comparison is going to happen here.
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| Target! Cease fire! |
3D: Pros and Cons
The most obvious change is the shift to 3D, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. The terrain engine varies from beautiful to clunky: buildings and trees often look great, but hedgerows have no depth, and it’s often difficult to discern changes in elevation. Moreover, the whole engine seems rather dark, which doesn’t help the player see the elevation changes or spot troops.On the other hand, the troops look good up close, as do the vehicles and guns. If you ever played Close Combat and wished you could get a grunt’s-eye view of the action, then GI Combat delivers. The trade-off, however, is in the complexity of the view system. While greatly improved from that found in the preview and demo versions of GI Combat, it still takes some getting used to. Ironically, you may find yourself playing mostly from a point well overhead simply so you can see enough of the map, dipping down to ground level only when necessary to check a line of sight or to sample the intensity of the combat. 3D thus adds eye candy and better terrain modeling, but not command functionality or ease of strategizing.
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| Typical command perspective view, of a burning farm |
Gameplay
You’ll do a lot of strategizing, and unlike Combat Mission, you’ll do it under time pressure. You need to think through your fields of fire, troop placement, and coordinating the efforts of tanks, infantry, and indirect fire support. One of the great simulation strengths of Close Combat was that the value of suppressing fire fell out of its morale system, and the same is true of GI Combat. Keep your troops supported with fire and leaders, and they will do reasonably well—but juggling all the pieces of the tactical puzzle in real time with limited information is a challenge. While both Combat Mission and GI Combat present 3D World War II tactics, Combat Mission’s turn-based presentation is more like chess, while GI Combat’s real-time action denies you the luxury of stopping time every sixty seconds.  |
| A grunt's-eye view: pinned down and popping smoke! |
And yet, some tactical angles of the game feel flawed. Because of the poor shading of terrain elevation, it’s hard to tell where the high and low points lie, and thus difficult to figure out fields of fire even when you’re using the “Fire” command’s colored LOS bar as an explanation. Units cannot fire through hedgerows, but they frequently take losses from fire that comes through the hedgerow to them.
Because lines of sight in close terrain are especially complex, and thus tend to block some soldiers' lines of sight, defending squads often fare better in the open because the entire unit can bring fire to bear on attackers. These troubles particularly plague anti-tank guns, which are very difficult to site in covered terrain and thus tend to be spotted and killed too easily.
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| Aftermath of storming a gun position |
On the offense, the computer favors massed charges and tends to do well with them. On the defence, the computer’s deployments are scattered and its units react poorly if at all to developments elsewhere on the map. A cautious, slow advance, leapfrogging forward with covering fire, reliably destroys the computer’s defence. Unfortunately, this tactic runs afoul of the game timer. At the default of 15 minutes, the assault is forced to move at a good clip in order to gain enough ground for a victory before the game ends. Not only can the AI defender usually make mincemeat out of this kind of attack, but, in my experience, the default timer frequently handed the defence a major victory just as the attack was on the cusp of shattering the defence. If the timer is set longer, however, and the attackers all break and rout, the game has to plod onwards to the end of the timer. There’s no option for a cease fire, as was found in Close Combat, and it’s sorely missed.
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| A StuG-3 defends a crossroads |
Indeed, other advances of Close Combat seem oddly absent as well. GI Combat seems to take an all-or-nothing approach to victory on a map. While Close Combat’s repeated engagements over the same map, with incremental changes in position, had their oddities and could be frustrating, the resulting battles also had a nice organic feel to them: “I took this copse last battle, so now I can site a machinegun there to provide flanking fire for that attack over there…” In GI Combat, despite having failed to capture any significant terrain as the attacking Americans, the game nonetheless advanced your reviewer to the next map in the operation. True, the overall operational situation meant the front would have advanced anyway, but being forced to slug your way forward across the map in order to advance to the next one feels more realistic—even if it isn’t!
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| I'm looking over, a tanker's shoulder... |
Scenario Editor and Multiplayer
On the other hand, GI Combat inherited Close Combat’s grand tradition of including a fully-featured scenario editor. While you cannot make the maps themselves, you can add any force mix you please to the 25 maps with any initial locations and objectives you please. Add to this the option of multiplayer games over the Internet or a LAN, and the game’s fans shouldn’t lack for opposition or variety.Tutorials and Docs
Winning new fans, however, is made more troublesome by the tutorial scenarios, which are uninspired sandbox exercises. The manual, while informative, has a few odd omissions, such as not explaining the nature of the “Lethality” setting in the scenario selection screen.Plenty of Promise
Ultimately, however, GI Combat is frustratingly disappointing. Much of the game is competent, yet hits the player with a series of little gotchas that add up to real annoyances. The 3D views are often great eye candy, yet GI Combat equally frequently left me yearning for the interface simplicity of Close Combat. Those who are fans of World War II tactics, Close Combat, or wished Combat Mission used real-time tactics will probably enjoy it.GI Combat isn’t a bad game, but a little more tweaking would have made it a great game. It isn’t fair to compare it to Close Combat, yet they are so closely related that failing to compare them would be equally unfair. Close Combat wasn’t exactly perfect on its first outing, nor even on its last—yet it still stands as a landmark in computer wargaming and it steadily improved. GI Combat shows plenty of the same promise, and we can hope Freedom Games is able to tweak the game up to its potential.
Review System:
- CPU: 1666 AthlonXP
- RAM: 256MB RAM
- Video: Geforce3 Ti200
- OS: Win98SE
Resources
Articles:- 2002/07/15: G.I. Combat (Preview)
- 2002/12/09: G.I. Combat (Review)
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