Shock Force tries to have it both ways in time management. You can play it in real time if you like, and, providing you have the machine to handle it, this is the smoothest experience. You need to plan your approaches carefully – even street by street if necessary – but it’s undoubtedly the most convincing real time wargame on the market. Larger battles, however, get quickly out of hand in real time. The speed and lethality of modern warfare means that you need to be in five places at once and you can’t just pause to give orders. While you’re planning an artillery barrage on one side of Damascus, your mechanized infantry HQ needs to find cover.
If you want, you can do it the old fashioned WEGO way. Simultaneous turns are the traditional mode of movement in Combat Mission but the speed of combat means that you need to take even more baby steps with your troops. If you expose the wrong side of your APC too soon, you will be killed. WEGO has always led to great moments of tension and drama, but here it often leads to excess caution or helplessly watching your stuff explode.
When the shooting starts, it’s easy to get sucked in. Vehicle facing, planning assaults, managing teams to surround a machine gunner…in all these respects Shock Force stands out. What’s not to like?
For one thing, the AI is erratic from one scenario to the next. The enemy forces are especially weak at seizing objective points and, when attacked, are as likely to sit and be pummeled as move out of the way. So, on the attack it moves in the wrong direction or too slowly and on defense it doesn’t adjust. “Panicked” troops should run for cover or surrender but more often than not they stay and die. Dead enders, I guess. They are so inert in some scenarios that you have to wonder if they have all been tested.
The user interface is even less friendly than the old one. Now standard interface tools like the right mouse button for movement or rollover tooltips for general information are eschewed in favor of a tabbed menu that assigns the same keys for different orders depending on which tab is selected. You can double-click to select similar units but not drag select for dissimilar ones.
Most disheartening is the limit on randomly generated battles. The terrain, frankly, isn’t that interesting most of the time. You can’t pick your own forces like you could in the older Combat Mission games. True, you have a smaller range of units to choose from this time out, but this was where a lot of the experimentation was done.
Maybe it’s unfair to pick at a game for not being an earlier game. But when you are building on one of the great series in wargaming, it’s almost unavoidable. Once you find yourself hunkered down in a low rise, trying to spot who’s shooting at you, Shock Force can evoke those same feelings of dread and tension that the series is justly praised for. And the developers should get kudos for striking out to make a game set in the here and now, even if there is a lingering feeling that this is often more Kursk on the Tigris than Desert Storm. But the game needs a little more spit and polish before it can assume its proper place in the Pantheon.
