Close Combat: The Bloody First

I have a soft spot for squad-level real-time tactics games that treat morale as a first-class mechanic, and that is exactly why Close Combat: The Bloody First is both interesting and frustrating to evaluate. The series has been doing individual soldier psychology since 1996, and this entry keeps that tradition alive. Every man in your company is tracked by name, kill count, and mental state. A tank crew member can panic after an armour-penetrating round bounces harmlessly off the hull; a rifleman who has watched his squad get cut apart by an MG team may simply refuse your next move order. That granularity still feels fresh against the broader RTS landscape, and it remains the single strongest reason to give this game a look. The move to the 3D Archon engine, the first full engine overhaul the series has ever seen, produces genuinely useful results in one area: line-of-sight. Pressing CTRL now activates a viewshed function that shades unseen terrain, which is a significant step up from the old fire-line radar-sweep approach. Elevation also reads much better in 3D, which matters enormously when you are deciding whether to push infantry up a craggy Tunisian ridgeline or hold a bocage-flanked road in Normandy. The three-theatre grand campaign, covering Tunisia, Sicily, and Normandy with 32 battlefield maps and over 36 discrete battles, gives the game genuine scale. Pre-battle options let you choose attack timing, from a hasty assault with no resupply to a dawn attack that may refill off-map support like airstrikes, and you can reorganise squads into specialist roles including scouts, anti-tank teams, and close-combat detachments. Here is where the ledger turns ugly. The AI is weak, and community criticism at launch was sharp and sustained. Pathfinding misfires constantly: soldiers take bizarre detours, mortars refuse to fire because the engine cannot correctly calculate indirect-fire trajectories, and vehicles with a larger footprint make pathfinding failures a near-certainty in anything resembling tight terrain. The visual output of the Archon engine reads well at the tactical overview level but falls apart under zoom, with character models that reviewers charitably called rough. Steam community sentiment sits at Mixed, with roughly half of nearly 400 reviews positive, and most of the negative weight traces back to these technical issues rather than to the underlying design. Post-launch patching did address some of the worst bugs, and a free camera mode was added within weeks of release. A map editor and modding tools followed in 2020, with at least one community-built overhaul mod available afterward, which is good news because the mod pipeline is where this engine may eventually realise its potential. For a newcomer to the Close Combat lineage, the learning curve is real but manageable. The order system itself is straightforward: click a squad, give a destination or a fire order, watch morale deteriorate as contact intensifies. What takes time is reading the opaque morale readouts and understanding which terrain genuinely provides cover versus which merely looks protective. That opacity has always been a series trait, but it hits harder when the new 3D presentation implies a visual clarity that the underlying feedback systems do not yet deliver. If you want a cleaner introduction to WW2 real-time tactics, Combat Mission or Steel Division 2 will hold your hand more firmly. If the specific combination of named-soldier persistence, three-theatre historical scope, and pausable real-time infantry management sounds like your kind of problem set, this game has a ceiling worth working toward, particularly at a discounted price several years on from a rough launch.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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