Combat Mission: Shock Force 2

Hyper realistic, purchased at the recommendation of the Canadian Army Command and Staff College to get some wargaming experience, and this has been a really good challenge. The realism comes from the lethality caused by improper tactics, rushing your approaches, not using recce forces sufficiently. It rewards proper doctrinal strategy. Highly recommend for any army officers and strategy game fanatics looking for a real challenge

This is a really fun turn-based strategy game without a current parallel. There's a lot of content to be played with mods, many of the campaigns are really fun and intense. It's just not worth the $60 as the game looks and feels super dated. Get it on G2A or on sale and you'll have a lot of fun.

A little aged in graphics but I still find I come back to this game more than other realistic RTS. I enjoy the detail of the weapons and the realistic feel of the combat. Once you get an idea on proper tactics the game is an absolute joy. Highly recommend when on sale.

"ARMA: Commander" could be another title for this game. If you care about what each guy in every squad of every platoon and company in your battalion is carrying, down the the clips and rounds, this is the game for you. This is not a casual RTS game and actions per minute do not matter here. Nothing is as sad as seeing your pixeltroopers massacred executing what seemed to be a solid plan when a hidden machine gun opens up. Every game in this series is gold, and they all run on the exact same engine, so pick an era or theater that interest you and buy that game. This one is very much Mid 2000's War on Terror vibe, but the WW2 games are equally authentic and great.

This is the first Combat Mission game i've played. It's the kind of game you will either instantly love and become deeply, hopelessly obsessed with, or find supremely tedious and immediately drop. There isn't much of an in between. You can easily spend 60+ hours on the US Army campaign *alone* and by the end of it have a newfound appreciation for the Stryker AFV. The Combat Mission worms burrowed far enough into my brain that I was compelled to assemble & paint a 1/35 scale M1126 Stryker model after finishing the campaign.

Combat Mission has a painstaking attention to detail that you won't find elsewhere. The marketing isn't lies - every system of every vehicle down to the handling and the ammo it carries is tracked by the game. The engine also simulates weather, communications, morale, spotting and so on. Taken together Combat Mission is unique to anything I've played before.

Shock Force 2 simulates an asymmetrical war at a tactical level. Losses carry over between missions, if you carelessly let a rifle squad get wiped out, then they're gone for the rest of the campaign. You can fail missions for unacceptable collateral damage (levelling a town full of civilians AND militants) and you can fail from losing too many friendly units. Nine out of ten times rushing or getting sloppy gets your nose bloody, but sometimes you do get lucky. The game rarely pulls its punches, but never in a way that feels unfair. Whenever a mission goes sideways I can usually trace it back to me deciding to do one or more careless things. Once you understand how the enemy operates (not like a fancy NATO force at all!) you can start countering their sneaky tricks (All rooftops are concealing Kornets and all ditches and tree lines along roads are concealing ambushes until proven otherwise).

The downside to all this realism (or the veneer of it anyway) is that the game IS SLOW and the learning curve IS STEEP. Getting jumped by Syrians with shitty AKMs and ATG-3s isn't fun when you don't understand what you're doing wrong. "How do I get the Javelin out of this stupid eight wheeled bus and use it to shoot rusty soviet era tanks?" expect at least an hour or two worth of tutorials, manuals and YouTube videos before you fully figure it out. The first road block is understanding how use the clunky user interface. The second is understanding how to use the Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Bush era US Army fights Syrian conscripts totally different to WW2 era US Army fighting D-Day Germans.

Remember - Spotting is black magic, Javelins are heavy but put holes in things good and Strykers have less armor than you think they do. If in doubt, Usually Hapless probably has a good video on it. Have fun & good luck clearing the mine field at the border ;)

first thing I would like to say is that the issues with AMD hardware for this game seem largely resolved and despite a few small issues it runs smooth.
I am enjoying this game so far, there is a lot of gameplay that is massively different from any RTS I have played before, perhaps the closest thing to this would be the Graviteam Tactics games or Tank Warfare: Tunisia. you will need to learn real life tactics and learn how the movement, spotting and engagement systems work. overall, I am having fun with it.

Apart from an obsolete game engine, otherwise a great game.