Close Combat

Close Combat, released in 1996 by Atomic Games, ran against the strategy current of its time. While most of the genre was built on harvesting resources, constructing bases and producing units, none of that exists here. The player is handed a group of soldiers, a map and an objective, and has to finish the job with what is on the field.

The defining element is psychology. Units carry morale, fatigue and fear, and these are not decorative: under heavy fire men go to ground, stop obeying orders, or run to the rear regardless of what the player wants. That shifts the centre of the game away from micromanagement toward something else — learning to cover an advance with suppressing fire, not exposing troops needlessly, and resisting the urge to push too fast.

Play is real-time on hand-drawn top-down maps that look more like military plans than game levels. The setting is the Second World War, and the design insists that weapons have realistic ranges, penetration and behaviour. Casualties are permanent and firefights are short and brutal — an engagement is often decided inside a few seconds.

Microsoft published it, which gave the title a reach a small studio could not have arranged alone. Close Combat founded a series that ran for years, and its approach — realistic tactics with no base building — influenced an entire branch of the strategy genre. If you like strategy games where you think about terrain rather than economy, this is one of the sources that branch grew from.