Here’s one for the game of the year list: Combat Mission: Shock Force.
I was just about to ask whether reviews were coming in for this. Gamerankings only has one crappy review so far.
Edit: Holy crap, what a scathing review! Were you a fan of the originals, Tom?
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!
You did this deliberately, didn’t you, to punish us for the Anyhoo thread, right?
I’m pretty sure it should be shoo-in :) But now, dammit, I’m not entirely sure.
Edit, no, wait, now I’m sure again: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/shoe-in.html
I’ve been playing this for over a week.
Tom is right. The performance issues are the real killers here for me, but he doesn’t even mention the terrible pathfinding. Or the terrible AI. This game is broken.
Supposedly two quick patches are on their way. But this is stuff that should have been caught in beta.
Troy
ElGuapo, I’ve been an inveterate dabbler throughout the Combat Mission series.
Ooh, I didn’t know that one, Miramon! Good catch. Fixed in v1.01.
And, actually Troy, I’m pretty sure he does mention the terrible AI. :)
-TomGod damnit. That review pretty much outlines the worst-case-scenario I feared when I first heard they were doing a modernized Combat Mission.
You’re right. He does.
Sometimes he misses things though. Like shoo-in.
Troy
Yeah, I was seriously wondering how they were going to do T-72s against M1A1s. I wondered why no T-90s? Why no other tanks (Leclercs bought from France, maybe?). This explains it. They just dropped the ball. Ughhh. Best tactical combined arms game, ever, screwed up. Sigh.
Gah. I had pre-ordered this eons ago based on my largely positive experiences with the other CM games. Now I’m just glad I still have BtS to fiddle with next week…
I’ve long ago lost faith in Battlefront. Their shocking website makes me want to rip my eyes out. Why do they think being web retards gives them strategy game street cred? Just makes 'em look cheap and lazy.
Somehow I knew CM with modern graphics was too much to ask for. Damn.
From the Battlefront forums:
"And as for his review he lost me with “But in order to present a challenge here, the limiting factor tends to be the number of available HEAT rounds balanced against enemy armor, an equation that will be contrived at best.“
He obviously isn’t aware of the other rack full of APFSDS which is designed to defeat armour. So I stopped there."
Did you miss something there, Tom? I’m not sure what your background with modern tank sims is, but you don’t use HEAT against armor… it’s for light vehicles and infantry.
I assumed when I read this part that you were saying that they specifically took anti-tank (APFSDS or SABOT or whatever) out of the game to make killing lower-tech enemy tanks harder. Is that the case? Or did you not see how to switch to AT rounds?
That’s what I get for trying to talk grognard talk. I simply meant the number of rounds good against tanks, particularly in the scenarios I played where RPG teams are balanced against armored vehicles.
So I guess the “AT” in HEAT doesn’t mean anti-tank? Doh! So much for my wargamer cred… But I guess I’ll just chalk that up under another reason why the game should have better tooltips and documentation, and probably a tutorial to boot.
-Tom
No, it does. It’s just not that good against armor. Duh…
The worst part about the site is there is a huge honkin “JOIN THE NAVY” banner ad that takes up the entire top half of the screen and doesn’t go away with scroll… making only the bottom half of the screen useful for browsing the forum.
Why is there a JOIN THE NAVY ad on a corporate website, anyways?
Also, there are some real gems in here:
Why do you say he is reviewing an early build? The build he and I played is the same as the gold master version sent to Paradox.
The Gold Master 1.0 is several weeks old, so yes, it is an early build. The whole point about sticking to a certain release date has been that version 1.01 is ready by then.
Wait, so the AT in HEAT does stand for anti-tank, but it’s not good against armor? Huh?
FWIW, I’m pretty it was taking out US Bradleys, but I could have been misreading the replays.
-Tom
Used to be good though. Doesn’t matter, whatever you do a grognard will eat your insides.
Yeah. It doesn’t make much sense. (my “duh…” comment was sarcastic) I think what happened was it used to be quite good at taking out armor, but as armor got better, it was less effective. New rounds had to be developed to take out the newer armor, but HEAT was still useful against lighter armored targets (such as bradleys and APCs) and also still blew up real good so it was good for supressing infantry. It’s name might be a holdover from better, simpler times when it was the primary AT round.