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 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 ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 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 ;)

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

This game is capable of replicating the fundamental tactical tenets of modern combat to a certain degree—but only to a limited extent. Regrettably, it utterly fails to capture the authentic reactions of infantry squads when they come under enemy fire. The clunky control system also frequently reduces column deployments to chaotic disarray, and if you deviate even slightly from the scenario designers’ intended playstyle, every mission devolves into something ridiculous and farcical. A prime example: in the campaign scenarios, NATO forces are inexplicably short on artillery support, while defenders field more troops than the attackers—a scenario that stretches credulity to breaking point!

That being said, for all its flaws, this is an exceptional wargame that outshines most others on the market. If you’re willing to exercise patience in commanding your units and leverage the principles of fire and maneuver to seize the upper hand, the payoff is an experience of pure tactical bliss!

Awful controls, horribly priced, terribly graphics, stupid AI but somehow I still enjoyed my time.

Since last patch game is broken, units don't spawn. Fix this.
Edit: They fixed the game but it took an absurd amount of time.

Game has been patched up and functional.
100% Recomendation for people that want real operational control and consequence.