G.I. Combat Updated Preview

Eric Young and his development team at Freedom Games know a thing or two about hard-core wargames. Much of the group's extensive design experience comes from making wargames for companies like TalonSoft and Atomic Games, and Young himself was one of the guiding hands behind the popular Close Combat series. That's why Young raised more than a few eyebrows when, earlier this year, he downplayed the wargaming aspects of his forthcoming game, G.I. Combat Episode 1: Battle of Normandy. He told us in an earlier interview that "the single most important feature will be the RTS aspect of the game. G.I. Combat is much more than a wargame. In fact, I don't call it a wargame." For Young, the philosophy behind G.I. Combat apparently isn't to squeeze the game into some narrow niche, but rather to make it "straightforward to play, and not force the detail of simulation on the player." So, whether you want a relatively accessible 3D wargame or an RTS that's carefully based on history, G.I. Combat might well offer what you're looking for.

In G.I. Combat, you'll get to relive the fierce fighting between the Germans and Americans in the Normandy region during and after the famous Allied landings there on D-Day. The game will ship with around 25 skirmish/multiplayer maps, as well as nine multibattle campaigns and operations that play out on several linked maps. You'll get to configure each battle to suit your own level of ability and style of play, tweaking a number of realism options. For instance, you can toggle the fog of war on and off, as well as the effects of command and control on your units' ability to get the job done. You can also give all troops in a unit an equal ability to carry out a task, or choose to have each soldier rated individually.

G.I. Combat plays out on the tactical level, with each unit consisting of a single squad, weapons team, or vehicle. You can control up to 120 men at a time, and this focus on controlling squads, as opposed to, say, larger platoons or every single soldier individually, should help you keep a handle on things while still letting you relate to the men.

In fact, the game still treats every soldier within a squad or crew as a unique entity. Each one is defined by numerous statistics--statistics that tend to work behind the scenes rather than requiring any sort of micromanagement. Each man is rated for health, strength, morale, training, leadership, mentality (essentially how he holds up under combat), and weapon expertise.

One of the major focuses of G.I. Combat will be the psychology of the troops. Units are semiautonomous, trying to carry out your orders as best possible but opting for self-preservation if you issue a suicidal command or if enemy fire grows too intense. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a strength indicator for each unit, which shows the rough number of casualties the unit has incurred, as well as a morale indicator. Morale can range from good, with a unit dutifully carrying out your orders, to broken, and then to routed. Units can even go berserk under certain situations. You'll be able to keep your men's morale higher by making sure they stay within the command radius of their leaders. Coupled with these overall unit morale states you'll find even more detailed psychological states for every individual soldier, ranging from panicking or cowering to heroic or fanatic.

Puts the "Real" in RTS

Before each battle, you'll get to pick your units from a task force pool, using a limited number of command points to "purchase" them. The exact units available will vary from battle to battle, though you'll usually get a decent selection that lets you assemble a force to suit different general strategies.

On the whole, G.I. Combat will offer a fairly extensive array of units. You'll find a wide variety of historically accurate squad types, which can be roughly broken down into standard infantry, heavy infantry, snipers, recon teams, and antitank infantry. To supplement these, you'll also get vital mortar and machine gun teams for long-range suppression, as well as flamethrower teams for rooting out the enemy at close range. You'll also find a variety of antitank guns, ranging from small 37mm guns up to the fearsome German 88mm gun. Under certain circumstances, you'll also be able to call in off-map artillery, naval bombardments, and air strikes to hammer enemy concentrations.

You'll also find plenty of vehicles in G.I. Combat. The American forces get, among other things, the M20 and M8 armored cars, the M10 tank destroyer, a number of half-tracks, and multiple variants of the famous Sherman tank. The German arsenal will include things like four different armored cars, Sturmgeschütz and Sturmhaubitze assault guns and howitzers, and various half-tracks armed with mortars, machine guns, and more. German tanks will include a couple of Panzer IV variants, as well as the deadlier Panther and Tiger tanks.

After you've selected your units for the coming battle, you'll get to survey the battlefield carefully and deploy your units to take advantage of the terrain. When you're ready, you hit the "start" button and begin fighting in moderately paced real time. With a simple menu or hotkeys, you'll be able to issue a handful of streamlined orders, like assigning defensive arcs to your men or telling them to move forward with caution or perhaps go for broke in a high-speed assault. Of their own accord, men will open fire on nearby enemies under many circumstances, but you'll also get to select specific targets for them if you like.

In the G.I. Combat beta build we got to play, quickly finding units on the battlefield sometimes proved rather difficult. It was easy to hear guns firing and men shouting during a battle, but sometimes it took a while to find out precisely who was shooting at what. Fog of war is one thing, but we hope it ultimately affects the troops more than the player in the finished version of the game. Perhaps friendly units and spotted enemies could get clearly visible bases that could be toggled on or off.

The camera system can make or break a 3D strategy game like this. At this stage, G.I. Combat seems to need some more work in this area to make the gameplay as enjoyable as possible. Some camera controls tend to feel either nonintuitive or overly sensitive, and they apparently can't be remapped, either. With many of the game's battles playing out on very dense terrain filled with trees and massive hedgerows, it can be hard to quickly get the camera to a good position from which to view the action clearly.

The terrain itself is looking moderately attractive at this stage, with orchards, village buildings, and the infamously dense "bocage" hedgerows rendered quite nicely by wargame standards. Right now, the soldier animations sometimes look a bit jerky as units advance, but on the other hand, their "idle" animations are looking great, with men scanning the horizon or resting their rifle barrels on their shoulders. The audio seems pretty effective at this point, too. Troops bark orders in their own languages, so you won't have to listen to phony German-accented English. What really stands out, though, is the shouts of fear and cries of pain as men come under fire and get wounded--the intensity of the cries can be almost startling for a game.

Whatever genre you want to call it, G.I. Combat looks like it has some solid potential, offering streamlined tactical action in one of the most familiar and popular of WWII settings. You'll get to fight through the hellish hedgerows yourself when G.I. Combat ships this November.