Close Combat: Cross of Iron

In my honest opinion this is the best Close Combat game ever released. (both original Eastern Front and the remake Cross of Iron) No other game had such a huge theater of war with units changing from operation to operation and from year to year.

The rosters have been updated to make the experience more realistic with some units deleted and most others getting new variations and improvements. Weapon and environmental audio has also been updated. Suppressive weapons Mortars are far more effective as suppressive weapons and kill with efficiency. They are now key weapons. To balance this however, 120mm mortars and the rocket artillery are gone. So less of the fun weapons but more effectiveness. Equally, machine guns can be devastating, (something they were not in CC3 in comparison. Armour The Vehicle AI is improved though still not perfect. The guns and armour has also been re balanced creating more historic encounters but also making the encounters less balanced. Infantry This is a mixed bag and keeps me from giving this a perfect score. on the one hand, infantry is more accurate, lethal and suppressive. When everything works, they seem perfect. But there is one big flaw. As soon as there is some suppressive fire of any kind, advancing infantry stops and runs back to the leader. this means that its very difficult to advance with infantry because every time they move forward a few feet, they end up moving back to position rather than go to cover and stand their ground. So you cant inch forward as they tend to move back and fourth over the same terrain. Couple that with the more effective Mortars and infantry only use is as spotters for your tanks. I would be okay with it if they would just go to ground and stay rather than always fall back. This deficiency is big enough to drop a full Star in my review. Otherwise, the game has improved in every category. For example, less unit homogeneity - balance than Close Combat 3 due to the above changes means you now need to use better strategies to overcome the imbalance. The sounds and the role of suppression is significant and not easily ignored, Its still a dated game from the late 1990's. If you can live with all that that implies, you will learn to love it

I played this game in its original form and that form had its problems. The reworked for is actually worse. The AI pathfinding always had problems (like driving tanks backwards towards the enemy exposing the weakest part of the armor) and hasn't been improved. The tanks now have ammo they NEVER had in WWII (like HEAT rounds for the SU-152 and Stg III) while the developer pats themselves on the back for removing the rocket artillery. They nerfed the HE so the SU-152 is no close to useless. The flat out wrongness of the ammunition and vehicles is in many ways worse then the original. The concealment for AT guns can be absurd (152mm IG firing three shots 40m away from observing enemy infantry and not revealed when the AI, yet a crap Russian T-34 with crap Russian optics can appear at start of battle and one shot your hidden human AT gun that hasn't fired yet from 400m). Whatever "balancing" they think they've integrated, they haven't. At this point I'm just uninstalling because it's just that frustrating. If I hadn't known what the original was like I might not be as disappointed.

Very expensive considering there is no modding support in the latest release. Players who want to play the famous mods like GD, Der Ost Front, Real Red etc. will have to install mods on their own into the game folders, following the instructions. However, if you are not interested in mods this is a very fun game. It will challenge you for years, this is the one strategy game that has never stopped being difficult and exciting to play. It's also realistic and will make you feel like the soldiers are real people, with real ideas about what to do or not to do.