Combat Mission 3: Afrika Korps

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.

This is the third installment of the Combat Mission series. Combat Mission Afrika Korps (CM:AK) covers battles for Crete, North Africa, Italy, and Sicily. In this special retail edition you get 65 additional scenarios and 15 new operations that were not included in the orginal release of CM:AK by Battlefront.com; and this game is cheaper than the orginal release! Also, the last official game patch is already loaded into the game cd. You don't need to worry about loading the game and then hunting for a game patch to fix known bugs; and spending time trying to download it. You can also find alot more (third party) scenarios and operations by searching the internet.
The only drawback of the game is that there is no hardcopy manual included. The manual comes on the CD. You can either read it on the CD, while you are not playing the game or you can print out the manual on your printer.
I own all three combat mission special edition games: Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord SE; Combat Mission: Barbarossa To Berlin SE; and Combat Mission: Afrika Korps SE. I can't say enough about the series. CM:BO is a great game. CM:BB and CM:AK are super great, the best two of the series.

Make sure you read the reviews of the other two games on amazon.com

This game is excellent in many respects. The first is that it provides the player with a very realistic canvas with which to play with. All weapon systems are meticulously researched and modeled (for example early Panthers had weak points under hull like they did in reality, ranges of weapons and hitting power very realistic, troop quality, etc.). The game's AI is not bad for a land based tactical combat game (although it is nowhere as close to that of a decent human player). For this reason the game is almost always more challenging playing against a human than AI. The PBEM feature makes this feasible. The game also provides great gameplay in that many of the scenarios are replayable and it provides the user the ability to edit existing scenarios and create their own. The latter feature is quite interesting as one can model scenarios from board games such as "Squade Leader". In addition, there are hundreds of consumer created scenarios that can be downloaded from various sites on the internet. In addition to single scenarios there are also "operations" that consist of multi-scenarios and really provide a good feel on how to manage assets and combat on a broader level (in terms of both resources and geographic goals). As a result the provides one with an excellent education regarding combat during WWII as a result.

The graphics also are not bad though no where as close to quality/photo realism as "Fallout" and other games. However, the other aspects of the game more than make up for this. The graphics are better than its predecessors such as Combat Mission Barbarosa though not signficantly.

The one critque of the game, of significance, however is that it is overpriced for what it is. It is not much of an improvement over Combat Mission Barbarosa, especially considering its $50 price tag. It would have a better value if it were to have been released as an "add on" to Combat Mission Barbarosa for about $20. Hence 4 instead of 5 stars.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 5 reviews  3.6 out of 5 stars