In this year’s play-by-comment Combat Mission game, the volunteer order issuers aren’t fighting a synthetic foe, they’re fighting each other. It’s January 1945. After a night of confused combat in a foggy/frozen Silesian city, four Soviet and four German AFV crews wake to find the fog gone and the frontline indiscernible. The next thirty minutes of armoured cat and mouse will decide which side goes down in history as The Lions of Lodowice.
Graviteam, Black Hand Studios, Freedom Games, Matrix Games, 1C… you can count the devs that have attempted to produce Combat Mission-comparable 3D tactical wargames on the fingers of one hand. Counting the devs that have actually succeeded arguably requires just one finger. A second digit will be needed if Ali Hamza, the bullish newcomer behind Battle Tactics 2025, delivers.
I don’t recall Lock ‘n Load Tactical Digital’s vitals ever being as attractively priced as they are right now. Besides tutorials, the core game may only include two WW2 and two Vietnam War scenarios, but as those scenarios cost, in effect, ten pence each, and can be radically rebalanced, generously extended, and played from either side, I reckon the phrase ‘unmissable bargain’ is warranted.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, MapFrappe and other tools, work out my location.
If you’d like to participate in this year’s ‘play-by-comment’ CM clash, keep a close eye on the site during the coming week. I’m hoping to launch the game on Wednesday morning, and – in a break with tradition – the Cornerites that issue the first set of orders will act as commanders for the entire battle.
A is for Abbreviated A2Z. My mammoth monthly news round-ups are on hold, but truncated digests like this may appear from time to time.
This week’s handmade co-op puzzle won’t defox itself. If you’re a dab hand at quizzes, lateral thinking, and search engine sleuthing, why not help out.
The Bangladeshi dev behind Battle Tactics 2025, an upcoming Unreal Engine-powered Combat Mission-like, refuses to draw a veil over war’s grim realities. Combatants in his high-fidelity RTT/TBT are going to lose limbs and buckets of blood in the line of duty.