Combat Course

Combat Course (1989, DOS) drops you into a military boot camp with no war and no heroics — just drill. It belongs to the wave of army training games that appeared in the late eighties after the arcade hit Combat School, and it presents basic training as a chain of disciplines built on precise timing and quick fingers.

There are five stages. The physical course has you vaulting walls, jumping trenches and crawling under barbed wire. The risk course adds planting dynamite and throwing grenades. The third discipline is hand-to-hand combat, the fourth strings the previous three into one continuous run, and the fifth, called Cobra, assembles a course from random elements so it cannot be learned by heart.

Style matters: correct execution earns points, hesitation and mistakes cost them. The most interesting idea is the ability to record a whole run and play it back afterwards — a remarkably modern feature for 1989 and genuinely useful for spotting where you lose time.

To be honest, it is an average game. The individual obstacles wear thin quickly, the controls demand a lot of mechanical repetition, and without the inner urge to beat your own time it will not hold you for long. On the other hand, racing against your own recording and the randomized fifth course give it more staying power than most training games of its era, and it still works well in short sessions. Approach it like an athletics game — a test of rhythm and memory rather than pure reflexes — and it shows you its better side.

If you want to try the drill for yourself, Combat Course runs on oldgame.cz straight in the browser with nothing to install.