A welcome departure from WWII, Shock Force takes on modern, asymmetrical warfare with mixed results.
The Battlefront team came to realize a while ago what many gamers and game developers are -- WWII is played out. There are only so many ways to approach Normandy and Stalingrad before it's just not fun anymore. While Afrika Korps was a fresh look at an oft overlooked theater of the war, eventually the war itself needed to be left behind. Enter Combat Mission: Shock Force.
Modern warfare is not new to Battlefront -- see T-72: Balkans on Fire and TacOps4 -- but they decided to depart from conventional warfare altogether and address the truly modern nature of warfare: asymmetrical, where conventional armies meet ragtag resistance to devastating effect. Shock Force is also the first game on the market to center exclusively on the U.S. Army's new Stryker multipurpose armored vehicles.
The story takes from modern events and pits the U.S. against Syria in the not-too-distant future. Like the U.S.' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the established military apparatus easily folds to the might of the United States, which then finds itself on the receiving end of stiff, unconventional resistance. Indeed, the game borrows from today's headlines by having the U.S. enter Syria from Iraq, and the quality of some of the Syrian unconventional units is improved by the fact that many have fought U.S. soldiers in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
As far as gameplay goes, Battlefront does not abandon its signature WeGo system, but it does introduce real-time gameplay for those more familiar with RTS'. Battlefront does do away with abstracted squads, however, and has each soldier represented as an individual on the battlefield with unique characteristics and abilities, elements it played with recently in Theatre of War. Even the terrain has been improved to allow more ground texture diversity, finer changes in elevation, and more complex buildings and fortifications than has been seen in prior releases. On top of that, the ground deforms after being impacted with high explosives, trees are even stripped of their leaves, allowing for an enhanced image of high-intensity fighting.
Shock Force deals with asymmetrical warfare in a very unique fashion. Whereas other games have essentially viewed unconventional units as similar to conventional units except for more relaxed uniform standards and different weapon types -- e.g., Command and Conquer Generals, Act of War -- and essentially played both forces similarly throughout the game, Shock Force treats unconventional forces, well, unconventionally. They have a far less structured chain of command, they can blend in to densely populated battlefields up until the point they engage the U.S. force, and they can field IEDs and car bombs to devastating effect. I can think of no other game where you look at a deserted vehicle on a battlefield and have to think, "Static object, or deadly weapon?"
I strongly believe that Shock Force is ahead of the curve in game development when it comes to presenting a realistic picture of today's battlefields. It's too bad, then, that the game launched with a myriad of problems which detract from the gameplay.
The first major problem is pathfinding. It's atrocious, especially for a game that centers on mechanized infantry and heavy armor -- you know, vehicles which you would imagine are operated by soldiers who are semi-competent drivers. Vehicles will sometimes travel 90 degrees from where you've ordered them to go, only to turn yet another 90 degrees at some arbitrary point in order to head to your assigned point. Sometimes this is a harmless annoyance, sometimes they drive right into the line of fire of an anti-armor unit and get explodinated. Dismounted soldiers, too, will sometimes find the most indirect routes towards a movement node and get themselves into a world of trouble.
Another severe problem is clipping and stacking, which ties into bad pathfinding. More often than not, if you order a group of units -- usually vehicles -- to move, they will bunch together into a single unit, which throws off their pathfinding, and cause them to dance around each other until they become unstuck and move forward. In order to overcome this problem and the general pathfinding issues, you're forced to move each unit individually, which becomes annoying when you're talking about more than just a handful of units.
The AI is, by and large, competent, but it is tied too much to waypoints and triggers. Obviously the Battlefront team was trying to avoid the problems of earlier Combat Mission releases where the AI would rush blindly at an objective in the same manner game after game, and for that effort they should be commended, but what they have wound up with is a very sheepish AI that is reluctant to do anything at all other than shoot. This does not just apply to the unconventionals, either (who you might expect might be reluctant to charge a generally stronger U.S. force), but even U.S. forces are slow to react to enemy movements until they have completed their own movements.
Graphically, the Combat Mission series has always been known for being basic, and relative to the series Shock Force is a grand upgrade. However, soldiers and vehicles look too much like clones of one another -- even though soldiers come with different face and skin types -- and after Medieval II: Total War showed the gaming industry that clone armies can be a thing of the past, this is inexcusable. The game is also deficient in the sound department, as soldiers have a very limited, and too oft repeated, vocabulary, vehicle sounds are redundant, and there seems to bee far too little variety in weapon sounds. One major omission I noticed was in terms of air support -- sounds are completely missing: If you call in a close air support mission, you don't hear jets or helicopters flying overhead, you merely get the ordinance that they fire. Once you notice this, it can downplay the intensity of a battle significantly.
The user interface, too, is hard to get a handle of. The most recent patch improved it somewhat, but the keys remain less than intuitive. Add to that fact that the game itself has no small learning curve (read: save frequently), and you might find yourself very frustrated very quickly.
Some bugs with the initial launch are actually quite indicative of the level of detail Battlefront put into Shock Force. For example, the 1.02 patch corrected an error whereby shoulder-fired missiles were failing too frequently because the smoke from their rocket exhaust was blinding their operators too quickly. I can't think of a game where the rocket exhaust of a shoulder-fired missile was made to effect, period. However, the game has lots of these kinds of small bugs that will require patch upon patch to be corrected as they are discovered.
In short, the game is great, but it launched prematurely, and that's not great. If you're willing to forgive some of the errors I have listed, this game will fast become one of your favorites; otherwise, it might be best to wait a couple of months for the slew of patches to be released in order to give you a better gaming experience.