It was one of the biggest and bloodiest conflicts between two nations in history: the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union from June 1941 until the end of World War II in Europe. Around 40 million men and women were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner in the conflict--and that's just the military personnel. Then there were all the killed, displaced, or enslaved civilians. By the end of the struggle, Berlin was a smoldering ruin, and the Soviets assumed a new, fateful place on the world stage. Soon you'll be able to play out the battles of this massive, decisive, and utterly brutal conflict in Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin.

The Soviets exact their revenge in the burning streets of Berlin.

Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin, or CMBB as the developers and fans often call it, will follow up on the highly successful Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. Created by tiny developer Big Time Software and originally published exclusively through its Internet publishing arm, Battlefront.com, Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord earned one glowing review after another and an impressive array of awards. The beauty of Combat Mission was that it took WWII wargaming to the people, seamlessly melding an intuitive interface and dramatic 3D battlefields and units with historical accuracy and detail. Like many great games, it was easy to get into, but it kept revealing more and more depth as you played. It was a game for novice wargamers and hard-core grognards alike, and it gripped you both emotionally and intellectually.

Now CMBB is set to offer a highly expanded and more polished version of that winning formula. The game will offer a much greater scope than its predecessor, with countless new unit types, improvements to game mechanics, major new command options, improved graphics and sound, and much more. That said, CMBB will at heart offer the same fundamental type of gameplay found in Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. You can expect to find the same groundbreaking marriage of turn-based and real-time gaming that made Beyond Overlord not merely a fun game but a potentially important one for the development of the strategy genre. You can probably also expect the same sort of pick-up-and-play possibilities, thanks to a fairly easily learned interface and controls. CMBB looks to be somewhat more complex than its predecessor, but you shouldn't be overwhelmed by the arcane unit symbols, obscure commands, and overly complex rules that bog down more traditional wargames.

Some of the new orders at your disposal.

The first thing you'll likely notice about CMBB will be its dramatically expanded scope. Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord played out in Western Europe from just after D-Day until the fall of Germany. CMBB will cover the entire Russo-German conflict from June 1941 through May 1945. You'll fight battles from the Crimea in the south all the way up to Finland in the north, from the heart of Germany in the west to Stalingrad and the banks of the Volga in the east. While the overall scope of the game will be enormous, the individual battles will play out on roughly the same scale as those in Beyond Overlord, typically though not exclusively company- to battalion-sized engagements.

Individual units will consist of squads, HQ units, special weapons teams, and individual field guns and vehicles. You'll get to command multiple branches of German, Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian, Finnish, and Polish troops. All these forces have been meticulously researched so that their organization, equipment, uniforms, and other characteristics all match their historical counterparts, year by year of the war. You'll notice, for example, little details like German troops sometimes carrying captured Soviet PPSh submachine guns, a not-uncommon practice during the war.