It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Combat Mission series to wargaming. Battlefront’s World War II themed games married strong research, accurate weaponry and simultaneous interaction to create a model for the rest of the industry. No need for hexes, anymore, guys! You could have quick action and cautious planning at the same time. It had destructible buildings before that was cool. And Battlefront clearly has the same ambitions for their modern war game, Combat Mission: Shock Force. It deviates enough from the old games to truly qualify as new, but is immediately identifiable as Combat Mission.
And that’s part of the problem. As inspired as much of the game is, the echoes of classics past make it hard to understand why some things were taken out, and other things included. It’s still a good game, but there’s no doubt it could be more than it is.
Shock Force is set in a near future that feels a lot like last year. Syria is implicated in a series of dirty bomb attacks, and refuses to cooperate with investigators. The American army, still in Iraq it seems, crosses the Eastern border to bring the Assad regime to justice. Apparently Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense, too, since there doesn’t seem to be enough GIs to do the job efficiently, at least not on your side of the war.
This latter point is likely a design decision to keep some sort of balance. If you stick Abrams and Strykers on the same field as an equivalent number of T-72s and BMP-2s, the battle is ridiculously lopsided. The American Army, after all, is about hi-tech weapons outclassing the other guy. And there is as much satisfaction in playing both an outnumbered armor task force taking out swarms of Russian-made tanks as there is playing an under equipped army using terrain and buildings to outfox a technologically superior force. The origins of the series betray themselves, somewhat. Fighting the Syrian Republican Guard in the desert doesn’t feel that different from fighting the Red Army on the plains. You just have a vaguely better idea where they are on the map, thanks to better intel. Oddly, you don’t have a better idea where the reinforcements are coming from.
The nature of the setting means that the US must also fight the irregular, unconventional forces that pop-up once the city fighting begins. You have guys on the back of pick-up trucks, RPG launchers and IEDs. This type of warfare requires a skill set so distinct from the US versus Syria stuff that it almost qualifies as a different game.
Some missions are, in effect, games of hide and seek. Since some unconventional forces mask themselves in a civilian population while they carry out their attacks, these units are simply rendered invisible to the American Army unless or until they take actions or make movements that can be considered 'suspicious'. Then, and only then, can they be spotted and targeted. It’s a neat abstraction that gets around the technical and moral limits of simulating an actual group of innocents to be killed.
This neat abstraction comes apart a little because of the limited feedback. The manual is intentionally vague on what the US is looking for or what the insurgent soldier should avoid doing. Beyond telling you to stay away from your target, the designers say that there is a great deal of randomness in how troops will react. So there is a lot of trial and error here, especially if you play the unconventional side. It’s not clear if you are being spotted or not. Earlier Combat Mission games had a line of sight tool that was a great help in planning your approaches – it’s not here.
