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Close Combat 5: Invasion Normandy
by Nelson "Admiral" HernandezBattlemaker
The scenario creator is not difficult to use, but it does not offer much flexibility either. You must fight on one of the maps provided in the game, and you must choose from the force pools of the battlegroups in the game as well. You aren’t able to apportion the victory locations the sides hold on the map. One side is attacking, and the other is defending, and the defender holds all the VLs. In CC2 you were able to define the terrain held by both sides.
The Battlemaker
The upside is that it is very easy to design a “what if” campaign of your own with some battlegroups that are available but not used in the historical campaign. This allows you to use some of the heavier German tanks, for example.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this review I promised I would compare CC5 to its cousins in the series and its competition. Most people, myself included, tend to think that the series started to go downhill after CC2, which seemed to strike the ideal balance between tanks and infantry and was about an inherently tense situation—Operation Market-Garden. Well, CC5 is a return to that spirit of things and I think that if this game is not the best in the series (for it depends on taste, I think), it comes very close. The graphics are good, the game is bug-free, and most veterans of the series have gotten over the battle engine’s flaws by now, or perhaps they never cared about them anyway. On that basis I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Close Combat, or who has never tried it.
Debriefing
But I feel morally obliged to point out that Combat Mission is simply a better game, and if you only have the money for one game you ought to get CM, not CC5. CM does not have a campaign, and the maps are not hand-painted. But it is an order of magnitude more immersive, more realistic, more flexible and infinitely replayable. It’s just more fun. The bottom line is that Close Combat 5 will be coming off of my hard drive in a few weeks; Combat Mission is still there, and I fully expect it to remain for months or even years.
"Admiral" Nelson Hernandez's Combat Mission Review
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