Close Combat: First to Fight

Close Combat: First to Fight isn��t awful. As first-person shooters go, it��s passable, saddled with the typical problems you��d find in a cheap game. It has horrible A.I. and ridiculous, mincing animation. The engine looks pretty good most of the time, but then shadows bleed through a wall or someone��s gun pokes noticeably through a door. It��s obviously an Xbox port, with its small levels and too tight field of view.

The level design is extremely linear and unimaginative. At one point, you begin a mission near a mosque and the briefing implies that you��re going to have to be extra careful, as the U.S. military traditionally has been around mosques. But all you get is a map with a golden dome and a minaret. There's your mosque. Now try not to shoot any civilians. That��s the extent of the level design. On several occasions, the game seems to run out of steam, so it plunges you into a sewer level. So far, so middling.

Semper Fi (Not Available in All States)

But what makes First to Fight notable��and not in a great way��is how it trumpets its association with the soldiers of the U.S. Marine Corps who are fighting right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. You��re in charge of a four-man team of Marines in Beirut shooting Syrians, Iranians, and radicals (translation: Shiites) by the dozen. It��s risky business making a game that is so directly associated with controversial and emotional real-world events. If you make a game like this, you better hope the gameplay does right by reality. You better hope it doesn��t occur to me that at this very moment, while I��m left-clicking to fire, there are American soldiers being shot at in similar settings, only they don't have a B key that instantly heals them, an M key that summons a corpsman out of thin air to teleport the wounded to safety, or a Reload button that resurrects them at the last checkpoint.

It doesn��t help that the designers all but pat themselves on the back for how realistic their game is, suggesting that it��ll be used by the Marine Corps as a training tool (translation: they��re bucking for taxpayer dollars to partly fund their game). Nor does it help that there��s a disclaimer stamped on the box in a cramped legalese font that reads, ��Neither the United States Marine Corps nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this product�� (translation: the paperwork didn��t go through as expected).

If You Want the Job Done Right��

But once you��ve resigned yourself to plunging through a shooter of questionable taste, you��ll resent even more its shortcomings. The squad control is the main feature of the game, but without better A.I., it can��t hold a candle to titles like Vietcong, SWAT 4, or Brothers in Arms. The control options are limited to telling your team where to stand and whether or not to throw a grenade through a door before storming the room. There are canned situations where you can call in snipers, chopper strikes, or mortar fire, which are considerably less spectacular or useful than they sound. The whole thing plays like the Star Wars action game, Republic Commando.

In the end, it��s all just tedious. You��ll shoot hundreds of enemies by the time you finish, picking them out with your handy radar. You��ll have to reload through some cheap ambushes, which include things like enemies spawning behind you or forcing you to crawl out of a manhole into the middle of a street surrounded by snipers, machine gunners, and armored vehicles. Which, to be fair, is something Marines should be taught not to do. So if it��s ever used as a training tool, at least this tasteless bauble has that going for it.

What��s in a Name?

Earlier titles in the Close Combat series are real-time World War II war games in which you control squads of soldiers. The twist in these games is that the A.I. controls individual soldiers, while you give orders at a higher level: Go there, hide in this farmhouse, fire at targets in that direction, and so forth. This system allows for a relatively sophisticated morale and suppression model. The lesson of the Close Combat games has been that guns aren��t just useful for shooting your enemies dead; they are far more useful for convincing the enemy to keep his head down so he doesn��t shoot back at you. And ideally, your firing will freak out the other guy, who will eventually run away. The Close Combat series hasn��t been about inflicting casualties so much as it has been about breaking morale. Unfortunately, there��s little sign of that legacy in First to Fight; instead, you should look to innovative shooters such as Ubisoft��s Brothers in Arms and Pandemic��s Full Spectrum Warrior as the true spiritual successors to the original Close Combat games.

Verdict

A tedious, tasteless mess.

PUBLISHER: 2K Games DEVELOPER: Destineer Studios GENRE: Shooter ESRB RATING: T REQUIRED: Pentium III 1.3GHz, 256MB RAM, 2.8GB install RECOMMENDED: None MULTIPLAYER: Internet, LAN (2-8 players)

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.