God only knows how many hours of my teenage years I sunk into this game. I'm glad to see it popping up on GOG and Steam, as getting my original CD copy to work these days wasn't quite as straight-forward as it used to be. The single greatest strength of this game over other CC titles to include the more recent titles and remakes, is the unit customization. Holy cow does that make a difference and a half. I suppose the one thing I often try to do is make sure the AI also has a fair matchup so it's not just a straight up steamroll right through them, like if the game decides to spam their unit with panzerfaust and you're using an AB group with no armor support. It at least allows you to influence the level of challenge involved. After you get the hang of the game, one thing I recommend doing is setting your side to elite difficulty and then opponent to green/recruit. The additional resources your opponent will get somewhat helps balance out the interesting decision making of the AI, while your more limited resources incentivize you to be a bit more conscious of your decision-making. (Save for a few different units that are crammed full of green troops regardless. Both sides have units like this, though the Americans have quite a bit more of them, to say the least.) Though the AI was never good, it's at least refreshing to see that there are still a couple of communities out there that play this game regularly. You'll have to look for it, but there's one discord group in particular that's fairly active, so finding someone that can actually put up a fight isn't the futile task it once was once the CC forums were shutdown. It's too bad that Gamespy no longer exists, as once upon a time, that's where I would find the vast majority of my opponents. All and all, the title itself is still solid and just as enjoyable as I remember. It's not as fast-paced as the more reactive squad-level RTS games out there, however once you play, you'll find the pacing is balanced.
I probably haven't played this game since winter 2003 at least. Moved at the beginning of 2004, so god only knows where my original CD is at this point. Even after all that time, I still find this game a lot of fun with the singleplayer campaign. One of the things I appreciate most is there's no auto-regenerating health. I feel like that kind of thing keeps you on your toes a bit more and encourages you to be more cognizant of your surroundings. Like if I'm only slightly down on armor and find a large armor pickup, I'll often leave it there and clear out the next area or two to try and maximize the amount I can restore as best possible/practical. That said, the AI itself is more difficult than I remember, what I find nice. Even on the lower difficulties, a couple mistteps can significantly drain your health and armor resources. The challenge is refreshing, as it feels like a lot of modern FPS titles are too... easy. At higher difficulties quicksaves are even treated as a resource, as you are limited few (if any) in a given mission. If you don't want the limited saves, but still want the stronger enemies, there's also a custom difficulty that lets you tailor which aspects you want and which you don't - such as the enemy difficulty, the amount of ammo you can carry, number of mid-game saves alotted in a mission, and one or two more items that I can't recall atm. Given the age of the game, there is of course some jank that's going to come along with it. If I were to complain about one thing, it would be colission detection with stairs. Occasionally when walking, it'll treat a step or two as a wall, requiring you to jump or run to go over that stair, which also generates noise. The gamma correction in the settings also doesn't seem to function like normal on modern hardware. Each time I start the game, I have to bring the slider down to min, and then back up again so the game doesn't look overly dim. It's two seconds to fix, but still. All in all, still enjoyable.
I'm pretty sure I still have my original box for this game somewhere that came with a little chunk of the Berlin Wall. In either case, by comparison to what else is out today, the gameplay isn't too complex, but not so simple as to be another C&C clone in terms of strategy. Still enjoyable without requiring the time-sink that things like HoI4, Combat Mission, or others sometimes require. All and all I still find it fun. The graphics surprisingly hold up decently, provided you're not one of those people who needs things to look hyperrealistic at all times. There's some jank trying to get DX10 to work on this, but at this point, some minor snags with hardware and software are to be expected. It is VERY much worth noting the following: To get this to work on a Win11 machine, especially one with a CPU that has more than 4 cores, there's a couple of things you may need to do. They're easy though. 1) There's some modder's dll patch (that I just found through a google search), that's needed on some, if not many, devices. The game generally won't run if your CPU has more than (I believe) 4 cores. It's a literal copy paste though. Easy peasy. Worked like a charm. No wonky install procedure or anything. 2) Now that you're game is running, you might notice that you're getting a lot of crashes. Often when cutscenes are supposed to play. It'll say it ran out of memory. The game limits RAM usage to 2GB regardless of how much excess overhead your machine has. Do a search for a program alled Large Address Aware, run it, select the game's .exe in the game files, and it'll correct the issue.
I remember getting this when it came out. I've always felt it never got the attention it truly deserved. Your anti-tank infantry are actually extremely effective. Your infantry also can't soak up tank shells like in most other RTS games. Not in the slightest. The skirmish AI is hands down probably one of the best in the whole of the RTS genre. ESPECIALLY the sequel, High Treason. (Of which it's worth noting the difficulty spike in High Treason versus this game is absolutely colossal. It's such a great challenge. Even on easy it'll really put the pressure on you, and it won't just sent a trickle of suicide scout squads to harass you. You'll get the first couple of scout squads hitting you, and then at random you can expect full on combined arms assaults on your base. It's amazing. It really keeps you on your toes. 10/10 RTS game, hands down.
I absolutely adored this game when it first came out. Back when AAA FPS games put the primary focus on the single player campaign, and multiplayer was secondary. It's too bad things like Gamespy aren't still around for cramming some 40 or more players into that one really small ruined town map. I'll miss that chaos. 😂 A time before aimbots became utterly prolific in FPSs like in modern titles today. Just to get this out of the way, I'm running it on Windows 11. I haven't had any issues getting into or playing the game at all. It works out of the box without needing to scour various forums looking for some hotfix someone made years back or the like. I call that a massive plus. The gameplay is still very solid. Zero complaints. Fortunately, this came out at a time when FPS contols were more or less becoming uniformly standardized, so there's no wonky controls like you'd get with the original Rainbow 6 or the like. Naturally, the graphics look like they were chiseled out of stone by today's standards, but the general layouts of the environments still feel well done. They're not so overdone that you have difficulty distinguishing what's what in the area you're in, or where the enemies are. (This was probably my chief complaint about Frontline, other than Frontline being more or less only for consoles.) So, I'm using exactly zero mods on this currently. The aspect ratio is locked into 4:3, so if not having native 16:9 support is something that bothers you, that's something to note. At start, both sound and graphics are tuned all the way to the lowest settings, so you'll have to manually crank them up. Haven't had any issues with framerates, though it seems to be locked in around 60fps-ish. (I'm assuming that's relative to the game engine. It's certainly not 144, but that's probably being a bit nit-picky for what it is and when it was made.) Overall, still greatly enjoyable. Definitely still recommend it.
