SimHQ.com - Land Combat Zone - Review - Combat Mission: Afrika Korps

Well, overall the gameplay of the first two games is brought forward into this game. The strengths and weaknesses of gameplay are still there, for good and bad.

AI is a mixed bag in this game. I’ve said before in other reviews that the AI is very good on the defense but very suspect on the offense and I hate to say it but CM:AK is not really any different. I played one game where my well placed Hetzer knocked out over six enemy Shermans, ensuring a victory. What was frustrating was that the AI just kept coming over the hill, taking hits and losses. It seems that the game gets a path hard coded and come hell or high water they will use that route to ensure victory. While good for my self esteem it makes many of the defensive battles somewhat boring.

I think that the AI’s weaknesses are really shown in this game. While CM:BO and CM:BB had the same problems, in those games the terrain view limitations (due to trees) often minimized the AI stupidity. The AI could sometimes move up without being seen. In CM:AK a large number of the missions occur in the desert, where the terrain and lack of vegetation really limit any kind cover and concealment.

In reality infantry forces in desert environments are nothing more than cannon fodder. The tank is truly king of the battlefield here and it shows. Take a couple of Matilda IIs out and you can literally run roughshod over the map. Infantry in the open don’t have a chance. This is probably realistic but it sure does lose some of the fun. Tank in tank stuff is still fun and infantry does have its purposes on the Italy. In fact, the tables are somewhat turned in Italy, the mountains make armored movement risky at best and dangerous in the norm.

For the most part the game does pretty well if you are on the offense. The AI does a good job generally in placing its forces to repel your attack. The AI on the defensive can sometimes be quite a nut to crack; the placement of pillboxes and machine guns seems almost psychic sometimes. It almost never fails that I will move to a spot covered by an AT gun or infantry squad. It takes wise use of artillery and air support as well as good combined arms tactics to crack some of the scenarios in the game, many I still can’t quite figure out.

One of the good/and bad things about the game is the size of the battles. The game can render battles which are huge. While CM:BO and CM:BB (to a lesser extent) were limited to battalion size operations or less, CM:AK allows players to play games made up of over a hundred units each.
The problem with this lies in the massive slowdowns you find playing the larger battles. My computer is no slouch (PIV 2.8, 1 gig RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro) but the large battles you can play literally bring my box to a crawl. It can take up to ten minutes for the game to compute the outcome of a battle, at times longer than it took to put the attack together. I can’t imagine trying to play some of these battles on a slower machine. In essence what it does is really limit the ability for the average wargamer to play some of the larger battles in the game. I honestly do think that the game engine has outstretched its functional ability to render some of these larger battles.

Some folks won’t mind this, I play some of the large battles knowing I will sit there for a while waiting for the game to figure out the combat phase. Just like many of the larger games out there the Combat Mission series is not for those that want a quick and dirty game. In essence, if you like the CM series then you are not an impatient person. Most of these folks will probably not mind a few extra minutes. Still, I wouldn’t try the larger games unless you have a fairly powerful computer, it may be too much for it. I could play CM:BO and smaller CM:BB games on my PIII laptop, I don’t even try it with CM:AK.

Where this game really shines is in multiplayer mode. Like the first two games (well, after CM:BO was patched) there is an option to play either by e-mail (pbem) or head to head. Against a real player the AI inadequacies disappear. There are several online head to head and pbem wargaming clubs out there that allow people to meet and pick matches against each other. The game does a good job preventing cheating among multiplayer games, passwords are needed and the pbem is setup to prevent people from sneaking peaks at game results before they send them off to the opponent. You have the ability to play any of the single missions or operations in multiplayer as well as quick missions. Many leagues and tourneys have sprung up with specific rules pertaining to the game. If you can’t find an opponent in this game then you haven’t looked very hard.

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