Musings on... Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem

Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem is a remake of the 1997 classic Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far and, for better and for worse, pretty accurately recreates the same feel as the original game. The Close Combat games are 2D real-time strategy games and are generally well known for their emphasis on small-scale tactics and encounters. They're tough, exciting and generally good fun, but they can be exceedingly frustrating on a regular basis.



The basic gameplay is very simple. The best way to play is the campaign, which can cover up to the whole of Operation Market Garden - the 1944 Allied airborne invasion of the Netherlands. When you begin you're presented with a simple strategic map consisting of various sectors. You drag and drop to move units around, and once both you and your opponent have submitted your moves any battles are fought and resolved.

When you begin you're presented with a simple strategic map consisting of various sectors

The battles themselves take place in real time, and usually feature up to about 50 individual men per side, although often less. Movement is very simple and intuitive, simply right-clicking on a squad gives you various different movement, firing and stance options. As such you can individually choose whether you would rather have your troops hide and wait for the enemy to get close, or have them open fire as soon as possible. On attack you might want to take it slow with the Move and Sneak commands, or have them charge objectives as quickly as possible with the Fast Move order. Speed is often the key in battles, as the bridges you need to take are very important, and after a short time the German player is able to blow them up. As an Allied player it's often a mad dash to try and capture the bridge before that can happen, and as a German player it requires a well-thought and desperate defence, designed to last just long enough to blow the bridge.

CC:LSM is a game built around moments. That moment when the lone survivor of a rifle squad took out a Panther tank. That moment when a well placed MG-42 took out the entire of the enemy's command squad. How about that moment when your bazooka misses the first shot, and frantically reloads whilst the enemy tank slowly swings its turret around to face them. Every action has a possibility of success, which makes it an incredibly compelling experience. Whilst it's unlikely that a two-man PIAT anti-tank team will take out an entire squad of elite Panzergrenadiers, it's possible. And when it does happen, when a sergeant storms a trench and beats three enemies to death with his bare hands, when things like that happen, the experience is unbeatable.

Last Stand Arnheim is a game built around moments                        

The campaign is an interesting exercise in asymmetrical strategy. As the Allied player the longer the campaign lasts, the worse for you, as your exposed airborne troops run low on ammo, and the German counter-attacks become stronger and stronger. The opposite is true as the Germans, where the opening stages is about delaying the Allies for as long as possible. Whilst it is an interesting system, I think the way that it's executed is a little bit... well, rubbish to be frank. Essentially when one side's morale falls too low in a battle it ends immediately and they lose some ground. What this means in practice is that three squads of German infantry could theoretically delay the Allied tanks for multiple days, a situation which to me makes little sense, as in real life the Allies would have simply kept pressing their advantage. Turning the option off doesn't work either, as the Allies simply progress much too quickly. I'm not sure what the solution is but I know they haven't found it.

AI is a major issue in the game... pathfinding is a disaster

The other major issue is the AI in the game, both friendly and enemy. Pathfinding is often a disaster, with your troops exposing themselves to unnecessary enemy fire on a frequent basis. When this happens to your key flanking unit it can be very frustrating. There's also a weird system in the game whereby if a unit fires at you and then hides, your units immediately forgets where they are. Thus a squad in a position where it has blocked line of sight to your guys can just destroy units when they get too close without reprimand. This makes them essentially impossible to overcome as you can't tell your people to keep watch on an area, and they won't remember themselves that they just ran headlong into an enemy machine gun sitting five metres away not two minutes ago. Very annoying.

My final criticism is of the enemy AI. Whilst during a battle it's usually solid, during deployment they often make some major mistakes. A good 75% of the time some enemy squads will start completely out in the open, just asking to be shot by your troops. This occurs on both attack and defence, and badly cheapens the experience, as the challenge on some maps can be very low. This is a shame because every now and then the enemy can surprise you with a well-placed squad in excellent position, or with an attack from an unexpected angle. Unfortunately these events are too few and far between to really make up for the mistakes. They also suffer from the same issue mentioned in the previous paragraph (which makes it consistent at least I suppose). This is especially egregious when it comes to tanks vs. bazookas, as they will frequently run multiple vehicles down the exact same road without any infantry support, and just have tank after tank get blown up by your rockets.

There are obvious and annoying issues in the Close Combat series which have never been fixed

It's arguable that I've only noticed this because of the amount of Close Combat I've played over the years, but to me these are obvious and annoying issues which have never been fixed. Honestly, despite these glaring errors the games are still easily worth playing. The sound design is fantastic; the animations, despite being tiny, are incredibly expressive; the graphics aren't terrible and often work to enhance the experience. Other than the inability to show hills (there aren't any contour lines), which can lead to confusing instances of people not being able to shoot each other for seemingly no reason, the maps are incredibly expressive of the terrain they're representing and over the course of a campaign you'll grow to love or hate certain battlefields.

Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem is all about building a connection. A connection to the battlefields you fight on, the troops you fight with and the victories and defeats you'll achieve and suffer. In what might be one of my favourite touches in gaming ever, the Close Combat series displays a stats screen at the end of each battle, listing every unit, named of course, along with how many enemies they killed and whether they were awarded any medals. It's this detail that pervades the whole experience. Ammunition is individually tracked per soldier, as are kills and wounds sustained, acts of bravery or cowardice, and all of their individual stats, such as morale, experience and leadership. It's a game that makes you care about the battles and campaigns you're fighting, and the little virtual men who are fighting them, and as such is an excellent, excellent achievement. It isn't my favourite Close Combat game, that would be The Battle of the Bulge (remade as Close Combat: Wacht am Rhein), but I think that it's still an incredible experience, and well worth picking up for anyone interested in the Operation Market Garden or this style of game.

The stat screen at the end of each battle is one of my favourite touches in gaming

Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem is available on PC from Matrix Games for probably a bit too much money for a game that's essentially 17 years old now.