Combat Mission: Shock Force - Marines Module
review by Trash

In 2007, Battlefront continued its well known Combat Mission series with Combat Mission: Shock Force. It offered great visuals for a wargame, both real-time with pause and WEGO turn-based gameplay, and the chance to drive Abram tanks into the streets of Damascus. Unfortunately it was also plagued by a myriad of bugs, performance problems and rather lackluster AI.

Just over a year later, the first expansion, or module as Battlefront likes to call it, is released. In Combat Mission: Shock Force - Marines you get to take the United States Marine Corps for a spin in the Syrian countryside while merrily blowing the place to smithereens. In addition to a new branching campaign, it also offers a number of fresh scenarios and a whole lot of new hardware to play around with. Also included is the latest patch, which takes care of most of the performance problems, enhances squad AI and seems to have squashed many of the earlier irritating bugs.

The Combat Mission games are in 3D and play out in a phased turn-based system. You give orders to your units, start off the phase and during 60 seconds get to see how your units try their best to meet your demands or die trying. Luckily units also display enough intelligence and initiative to react to changing circumstances during their phase. They will for instance switch target when they destroy the current one, fire while on the move, and take cover and deploy when they themselves come under incoming fire. Units also seem to make more intelligent use of the terrain and their surrounding environment to take cover from and engage possible threats.

In Shock Force a real-time with pause element was also introduced. It lets you play out the missions in real-time, which does add a sense of urgency and gives far greater control over what your units are doing. Even with the pause element it can however become rather chaotic and hard to track what’s happening when the larger engagements start to pop up. Both function well enough to be equally valid and in the end it’s up to personal taste to whichever method one prefers.

What’s more is that for a wargame, Combat Mission: Shock Force offered rather outstanding visuals. With the advent of the latest patches and the new Marines module this even seems to have improved. Soldiers climb out of the hatches of burning tanks, Javelin missile launches at night look great and when your first 500 lbs airstrike hits you’re bound to have to pick up your jaw at the sight of the mayhem. Not to mention that with tracers flying everywhere and explosions going off all around the night battles look superb. Still, these great sights do make the occasional niggle stand out far more. For instance, when a vehicle is destroyed this will never mean that the actual in game model is torn apart. The ground however can be fully deformed with craters and the like. This can lead to the rather bizarre sight of a heavy IED pickup jeep exploding leaving a giant crater with within its center an intact looking jeep which only bulges a little smoke.

The campaign is the meat of the module. The different missions all provide a number of objectives to fulfill and your performance in reaching these goals will determine how well the campaign will progress. The missions are all interesting and a lot of fun to play. This is just as well since most last for well over half an hour. Being an expansion it might not come as a surprise that the difficulty quickly ramps up as the campaign progresses with ever increasing odds to survive and overcome. It starts off easily enough with a light recon mission in which your elite troops can rain hell on some inept militia units, but it quickly ramps up to include a wide range of scenario types like ambushes, large scale urban combat and armored engagements.

Playing as the Marines you’ll have to some rather cool hardware in the form of new vehicles like the Amphibious Assault Vehicle and some of the strongest infantry units of the game. Recon troops are especially deadly in ambushes and assaults. The Syrians get their share of toys with amongst others their own elite airborne infantry and the inclusion of the Russian T-90 tank. All in all it seems as if the deadliness of the arsenal provided has only increased. Many units and vehicles can and will be wiped off the face of the earth with just a single or a few hits. This makes approaching an objective a rather nerve-wracking affair.

Unfortunately some of the problems that plagued the original game have carried over to the expansion. The most serious one for me remains that while the individual units display a good sense for self preservation the tactical AI is virtually non-existent. Instead of this the scenarios rely on scripted triggers and often an overwhelming amount of hostile forces. This sometimes can make a mission feel more like a puzzle instead of a battle and when mission objectives aren’t that clear it can be a frustrating affair to figure out what to do in order to advance the scenario. It’s even worse when triggers are sprung faultily or even refuse to be triggered at all. Wandering around aimlessly with your forces trying to figure out how to beat the game instead of the enemy is not that much fun. The interface of the game remains as clunky as it was and can really work against you when you’re trying to guide a number of platoons and armor through enemy fire. This problem is aggravated by some nasty pathfinding issues that still tend to pop up and preferably at the most inconvenient moments.

In the end it really boils down to that old stereotype that most expansions are only to be recommended if you enjoyed the original. The new units are interesting and fun to play with, the new campaign offers a lot of challenge, and the single mission scenarios are mostly well done and worthy of some time. There are however no real new gameplay elements added. Though I would normally not recommend a game based on the mods and user made scenarios I do have to mention them in this instance. There are scores of missions and even fully fledged campaigns made by users that rival and sometimes even put the ones that Battlefront’s provided to shame. While I’m still waiting for that elusive holy grail of a truly worthy AI opponent this will certainly keep me occupied for quite some time to come.