Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in the moment I opened the campaign map in Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem. There it is: a layered two-tier structure where you push battlegroups across a strategic overview of Operation Market Garden, then drop into real-time squad engagements for the actual fighting. The dual-layer design is exactly what I want from a wargame, and this entry handles the handoff between layers better than most Close Combat releases before it. You can rush British armour toward Arnhem at the risk of leaving the 82nd and 101st Airborne dangerously exposed, or grind methodically up Hell's Highway and accept that the lightly armed paratroopers north of the Rhine are on their own for a while. Those decisions have weight, and that strategic tension is the game's strongest argument for your time. At the tactical level, you command squads and teams, not individual soldiers. Orders are deliberately limited: move, move fast, sneak, ambush, fire, defend. That sounds thin until you start reading the terrain, managing suppression, and cycling reserves through chokepoints. The mission count is generous, with more than 60 battles and operations that include night fights with flare mechanics, river assault crossings, and destructible bridges across sites like the Arnhem Road Bridge, Nijmegen, and the Maas-Waal Canal crossings. The troop-point buying system lets you customise your force pool before each engagement, which adds a light resource-management layer on top of the already busy campaign. Veteran players can edit the opponent's roster too, dialling up armour presence if the default AI composition feels too soft. Speaking of the AI: it is the most honest problem with the game. It occasionally produces a clever flanking move or coordinates fire support in a way that feels genuinely threatening, but campaign-mode AI tends to sit back more than it should. Post-launch patches did tighten campaign aggression, so make sure you are running the latest update before judging it. The more reliable opponent, as the community has always known, is another human. Online PvP is where Close Combat lives and breathes, though be aware that on GOG the multiplayer is limited to LAN or direct connection, which narrows your options considerably. Steam cloud saves help if you bounce between machines. Now the honest part for anyone coming in fresh: the presentation is genuinely dated. The top-down 2D view uses small sprites against hand-drawn maps, line of sight is difficult to parse at a glance, and elevation is practically invisible. These are not charming quirks; they are friction that new players will feel immediately. The UI is also on the clunky side, with pop-ups and text that feel sized for a late-1990s CRT. If you already bounced off Combat Mission or Graviteam Tactics because of their interfaces, this one will not convert you. But if you can accept that this series never modernised its presentation and focus purely on the decision loop, there is a tight, historically grounded tactical wargame here with over 60 missions, a custom scenario editor with open-ended modding support, and a campaign that rewards replaying from both sides of the front line.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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