Combat Mission 3: Afrika Korps
by CDV Software
Our Price: $49.95
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Category: Video Games
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Product Summary
Brand: CDV SoftwarePrimary Contributor: Windows
Format: CD-ROM
Release Date: 2005-09-19
Platform: Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP
Model: CDV-00050
Publisher: CDV Software
Product features:
- Battles and Operations can be designed, modified and customized by the player with the full Editor that is built into the game. Create your own maps, save them and even re-use them in different battles using the new Map Import Feature or let the powerful Automap creator do it for you.
- The game and 210+ page PDF manual comes in three different installable versions, English, French or German
Video Game Reviews of Combat Mission 3: Afrika Korps
Customer Review: Though flawed, a must see for fans of ASL, Close Combat and / or Steel Panthers
Summary: 3 Stars
Overall, the game is definately the best WW II armor oriented tactical combat Sim yet developed, at least that I know of. Unfortunatley, it's still got major problems.
Biggest Gripe
Between every turn, after the computer "thinks" through it's next series of orders, the game saves automatically. There is apparently no way to disable this. On a small game it's no big deal, taking a minute or two at the most, but in a really large game it can stretch out to as long as 45 minutes per turn in my computer, (a 2.4 GhZ Pentium 4 with 1.5 Gigs of RAM, 256 Meg graphics card and a fast SATA Hard Drive). This is totally unacceptable, they should at least let you disable the option.
Command and Control
Surprisingly Good overall B+
The 3D zoom thing is actually a really neat interface. You can zoom out to a 3D view kind of like a typical real time combat game, or you can zoom up to an overhead view. While the battle is goign on it's really fun to zoom down to the individual first person eyes view level, it makes it all much more immersive. You have to zoom back out to see anything though. Best command feature is how you can not only go in reverse (the inability used to drive me nutz in Close Combat) but you can string together all kinds of movement commands. Like race to the edge of the building a top speed, creep around the corner, then retreat back around to safety after taking a look. There is even a shoot and scoot order you can give. The maps are huge, and the game can accomodate a maximum of about 30-50 tanks or an equivalent in Infantry squads per side in the largest game... that is if you can get around the save game problem per above. The only real complaint I had in this department is that in quickie games all your units start off in line side by side along one edge of the map, rather than being organized by unit, and you have to group them by units for reasons of command communications, which means a lot of extra set up time before a fight.
AI
Good B
Generally pretty good at a tactical level. Tanks will move around obstacles, fire smoke, and even back up out of danger. The strategic AI is about average for these games.
Battle realism and Ballistics
Excellent. A-
Alot of verisimilitude comes from the various types of penetration. You can get partial penetrations, enough of which may eventually freak out the crew enough to bail out, all the way to catastrophic explosions which rock the whole area and can light the grass and nearby objects on fire. I'm a bit less impressed with the infantry wepaons which seem to be done abstract with a firepower rating. I think they underrate a lot of the smaller weapons like .50 caliber machine guns, LMG's and light mortars.
The fog of war stuff is cool. Enemy units first appear as some dust kicked up, then you see enemy insignia (iron cross for German, Fasci for Italian, White Star for US etc.) then a generic vehichle shape, which is usually off center and at least a few yards away from the real thing, and finally an actual identifiable vehicle, gun or infantry unit. Even better, as the Americans, nearly every medium or larger sized tank I saw first appeared to be a Tiger, which really startled me at first. This reflects the fact that during the war US troops tended to think every German tank was a Tiger. A really cool feature.
TO&E
Inconsistent. C
It seems reasonably complete for the German units, considerably less so for Allied. US lack late war armor such as Sherman Jumbo's, M-36 Jackson Tank Destroyers and Pershings. The lack of the Jacksons in particular make it hard on the Americans in any real late war scenarios such as several Battle of the Bulge scenarios which are included with the game. Despite having a lot of French units and scenarios featuring French troops, both pre- and post Vichy, there are no French made tanks or guns. There don't seem to be any combined arms (mixed armor and infantry) units that you can purchase. This is pretty inexcusable considering that they could have just borrowed the superb tables from the public domain versions of Steel Panthers. When making your own game you can choose vehicles, guns and infantry units by points ALA Advanced Squad Leader or Steel Panthers, but as with so many of these games, the points are way skewed. A 20mm auto cannon with gunshield costs less than a medium machine gun? A M-10 tank destroyer is cheaper than an M3 ?
GRAPHICS
Mixed but mostly bad D
Good Points
The vehichiles look pretty good generally, if not spectacular. There are nice animations. The infantry and tank crewws look around nervously. The tracks and wheels seem to move. The ground can catch on fire, fire (fuel?) can spill out of knocked out vehicles. Buildings can be destroyed by artillery or cannon fire. I like the camera shake when the heavy artillery comes down. There are good weather effects and the trees sway in the wind.
Bad points
Infantry and guns crews are crude and cartoonish. One to three soldiers are displayed to depict an entire squad. The terrain looks bad, the buildings looks like paper-cut-outs. The ground is the worst, very crude. Water is particularly awful, displayed as squares and rectangles, and certain brush squares just came out as black squares on my computer, (and I have a good machine with a good card).
SOUND
Pretty Good B-
Some of the nicer details show up here. Troops talk in their own language. When they saw targets my US troops would cry "did you see that?" Each troop type speaks in their own language, Italians in Italian, Germans in German, French in French. English sound different than US troops. A big plus from the flight Sim Il2 Sturmovik where Americans have distinct Australian, English or Canadian accents. When troops score a good hit they sometimes yell something out. US troops sometimes cry "Booyah!" on a nice hit, and I once distinctly heard some British troops with a heavy cockney accent right out of a Guy Ritchie movie cry "he's BURNing!" in a thuggish, gleefully mocking tone that reminded me of a Clockwork Orange. This emphasises that oh so special moment that a knock out shot can often be and remineded me of when we used to hit a pot with a spoon while playing ASL years ago.
Downisde is overall the guns didn't sound nearly as good as in Close Combat, especially the US ordinance like the .50 cal.
Favorite moments
A pair of Churchill tanks rolling slowly down a road through heavy smoke, brushing aside knocked-out Italian tanks as they spray machine gun fire at fleeing infantry and take shots at surviving M13-40's with their 6 pounders.
My M-10 tank destroyer suffering a catastrophic hit from a PV IV while cruising at full speed, and rolling part way down a hill, still on fire. US Engineers using a flame thrower to roast SS pioneers who have been pinned in the forest in judiciously placed barbed wire. A half dozen M-18 Hellcats executing a perfect simultaneous high speed attack from two directions at once and decimating a Panzer column cruising down a broad city boulevard...
What I would like to have seen
It would have been nice if as overall commander, you would be notified when one of your troops, squads or vehicles makes first-contact with the enemy. A table of organization of all your units, and / or a mini- map showing the position of all your troops, which allowed you to zoom to locations on the main map (something like they had in Close Combat) would be very helpful. You spend a lot of time hunting for your troops, especially infantry. The ability to order your troops to hold their fire until the enemy is at close range would have been nice. Close Combat had Ambush mode and Steel Panthers had attack ranges you could set IIRC. Seems to be no way to fire smoke. It would have been very, very cool to be able to string all the one minute battle scenes together into one big movie of the whole Scenario, though I realise that would take up a lot of disk space.
A Campaign mode would be really nice and that is apparently in the works.
Bottom line:
Fix the save game feature, improve the graphics, and tweak the TO&E a bit and you would have a great game. All that plus Campaign mode and you could have a phenom.
Description of Combat Mission 3: Afrika Korps
Combat Mission: Afrika Korps is a 1-2 player, hybrid turn-based/realtime 3D simulation of WWII tactical warfare in parts of the Mediterranean Theater including North Africa, Italy, Sicily and Crete from 1940 to 1945. Experience combat in a full 3D battlefield as machinegun tracers arc overhead and exploding artillery shells shake the earth! Watch the famous Deutsches Afrika Korps storm the fortress of Tobruk, or help the US and British forces defend against powerful German counter strikes at Anzio. Fight with the elite German Fallschirmj?ger units in Crete, or follow General Patton's sweep across the island of Sicily.The fluid game interface combines with 3D lines of sight, misidentification of targets, enemy detection by sound, advanced armor penetration systems, unit morale and leadership effects, spreading fires and billowing smoke, wind and weather - and much more to bring you unprecedented realism in a computer simulation.
Units are squads, teams, and individual vehicles. You can command a force as small as a depleted platoon, or as large as a several reinforced battalions. Each man and weapon is kept track of for maximum realism. Full Tables of Organization and Equipment (TO&E) for all the nations represented (Germany, USA, Italy, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Poland, South Africa, France) are modeled with thousands of different unit types available depending on the year, month and region
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