Close Combat: Modern Tactics review

Ten years ago the idea of giving every soldier in an RTS a name, a sense of self-preservation, and eyes capable of seeing further than 100m was as mad as it was daisy-fresh. Today, every military strategy does it. No- hang on a minute- they don’t, do they? Close Combat remains eccentric- a WWII skirmish series more concerned with subtlety and simulation than ’splosions and cinematics.

Based on a training tool made for the USMC, Modern Tactics shifts the top-down tussles from the Greater Reich to the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East. Twenty-five standalone battles recreate the kind of firefights that have peppered papers and TV newscasts for the last decade or so.