A missed opportunity to upgrade the game engine and very little content for the money.
To be fair, the patches for CM:SF have changed the gameplay considerably (action spots are now highlighted, for example, and tactical AI makes soldiers' self-preservation somewhat smarter), and there have been ten of these, with MARINES incorporating 1.10, also available for free to CM:SF owners. So what should a game review of MARINES concentrate on? Much of the content in this module is really applicable to CM:SF also given the patch applies to both. Perhaps the biggest criticism of MARINES is the lack of fresh content - a single new campaign and fifteen standalone scenarios along with a short list of new vehicles and unit types plus some maps.
The campaign has apparently not been thoroughly tested and readied for release. The official forum gave me notice shortly after release day that a "minor tweak" had to be made to the campaign file because the second mission needed to be changed, and now it turns out that a bug cuts the campaign short by four battles. You won't know unless you read the developer's forum, but there are supposed to be battles after Debouch to Disaster. They said so sometime back in October. The promised fix is still in the works; this review is written two weeks into November and no word on when we'll be able to unlock the other 20% of the campaign.
My own reaction to the campaign system has unchanged from CM:SF - it's not a campaign system at all. The player has little control over which sub-units progress from battle to battle and he's really just there for the ride. The Operations model of the original Combat Mission was a unique gameplay experience worthy of further development - BFC has declared it a dead-end that will "never, ever" be explored again by them, in favour of the scripted campaign model which, apparently, they are struggling in implementing technically in MARINES, uninterested in testing fully before shipping, and hesitant to fully disclose the problems in open forum once they've taken your money for MARINES.
Having seen soldiers in training for Afghanistan in environments almost identical to the villages portrayed in CM:SF, one realizes just how widely BFC has missed the mark with this badly made game and how little they captured the essence of modern combat. Ultimately, only you can decide for yourself if this game will be fun for you - and there are a multitude of ways you can find out for yourself. An up to date CM:SF demo is in the works, and an older demo of CM:SF is available via their site. A MARINES demo is apparently in the works also, and if you have CM:SF already, the 1.10 patch is free. You can also buy CM:SF itself for under 8 dollars at many retail outlets or on amazon online before taking the plunge for MARINES.
While you can't seek the counsel of someone else to tell you if you will find this game "fun" or not, I think there are major discrepancies between battlefront's concept of how to depict modern soldiers in combat and the way militaries actually do things. The 1:1 representation is not a success, and MARINES fails to deliver a solid expansion to CM:SF. It is poor value for the money. In fact, some bugs introduced into the base code of the game make it a leap backward. Battlefront admits to these bugs, and that includes vehicle pathing and AI controlled artillery which doesn't work properly in some cases. Stock animations I encountered in 1.10 had men running through walls and out into the street, a complaint in earlier incarnations. You still see men shooting through the side of walls instead of windows, too, so the 3D representation is only an eerie abstraction of what is actually going on. It's a very weird mixture for a game that claims to have a solid real world physics engine that tracks ballistics and bullets instead of making hit chances and simulated dice rolls. Syrian smoke dischargers lob black smoke over buildings blocks away - a weird effect that I noticed several patches ago and asked why - and never got an answer to. This undocumented "feature" was still there in 1.10 and I know it wasn't covering that Syrian IFV in Al Huqf because he was hotfooting around a corner on the other side of town.
Want your squad to jump over a wall (something every soldier learns how to do in basic training)? You can't, you have to run out into the middle of a street to do it. Want them to peek around the corner first and see if it is safe to do so? You can't do that either because there's no command to do it, and the AI isn't smart enough to do it for you. Don't even think about using realistic urban assault tactics like going through a window or attacking a house from the roof down, that stuff isn't modeled in the game.
But the largest disappointment for me personally is that Battlefront had an opportunity to address much larger issues, such as the broken Quick Battle system or implementing an easier pick and choose system for scenario creation. A random map tile system was discussed as a replacement for the old random map generator. They've promised to provide some of this in future games, but none of this was done for purchasers of MARINES nor apparently will it be done via patch. Those spending 25 dollars to get the MARINES are out of luck, though at least 25 new maps for your Quick Battle map folder are provided. But you can get maps (and scenarios - and campaigns, for that matter) for free out in the community, too.
The new Combat Mission is a disjointed mish-mash of design philosophies competing for attention; the worst of it is the 1:1 representation in which soldiers skitter about running far too slow as if under water, all acting creepily far too much alike, treading wearily into the Uncanny Valley. I think Battlefront would do well to attend a class or two in the Canadian Army's Gunfighter training. Perhaps it is just a tradition for the animations in Combat Mission to look wretchedly out of date.
I'm not unfamiliar with the notion that game designers design for effect, and that the developers of CM:SF - MARINES have had to abstract and average things out to capture it all. I don't happen to agree they've done so very well. In fact, I think philosophically, attempting to take a really good turn-based platform and attempt to split it out into both a Real Time game AND a WEGO game simply turns it into a game that is mediocre at both. The lack of command delays, for example, is obvious in WEGO, meaning that a key element of command and control has been stripped away in order to accommodate real time play. And scenario sizes have been severely reduced in order to accommodate real time since you can't command a battalion or even a company flanking maneuver effectively in RT. Battlefront wants to have the best of both worlds and ends up mastering neither.
CM:SF - MARINES could have done great things. It could have added hand-to-hand combat, which CM:SF didn't. In that regard, it furthers the idea I put forward in my review of the original CM:SF. It's not a game, it's a BLUE FORCE simulator. It simulated a training exercise, not a real war. If that's all this is supposed to do, well, you get higher marks, but outside the military, I don't think you're going to find a paying audience for people wanting to play Peacetime Training Exercise Mission. The U.S. Army no longer uses the term "double tap" but "controlled pair" - two shots to the chest, followed by one to the head. The 1:1 representations in CM:SF - MARINES should be up to speed doing things like this when they enter a room, but when they get into close contact, they sometimes still just mill around and stare at each other. There are no controlled pairs during room clearing that I've seen here, but of course, in MARINES, you have to pretend there are actual rooms, too. Maybe I just "don't get it" but I can't find where the abstractions end and the most realistic battlefield simulation that some of the other reviewers are talking about begins.
CM:SF - MARINES could also have added - oh, say, water (crazy idea for a game with amphibious vehicles in it), and new terrain types and weather, which would have been great variety for a bland theatre of war for which they were charging half the price of the original game. They could have added engineering tasks, wire, roadblocks. They did none of that but instead added a paltry few new units and simply gave the U.S. player new ways to outgun the outclassed Syrians, though the T-90 is a nice addition to the Syrian inventory. US Army vs US Marines scenarios are possible for more balanced games, but again, these are only good for fantasy or peacetime exercise scenarios.
Perhaps the most brutal part about MARINES that has gone unamended is the end of mission screens. The scenario format is very complex - a point in the game's favour really, since the Syrians are so uncompetitive, you need to have asymmetric victory conditions. And the scenario editor is very flexible, given that it is based entirely on scripts (a hybrid of scripts and AI-driven scenarios would have been better, but BFC opted to gut the game of any true strategic AI layer - too bad). But the end game screens give very little indication in many cases of why the game ended the way it did; with so many complex layers of victory condition, there are so few ways in the end game screen of explaining it to him. And there are no kill stats or data for the player to look at, another nice touch added to the pile of nice touches removed from the original game engine. MARINES could have - should have - set Shock Force on the road to addressing all this but unfortunately didn't.
MARINES is nothing more than a failed opportunity to improve the CM:SF line; it actually degraded the original product by introducing flawed code that injects new bugs to several key routines such as pathing and artillery; it went out apparently untested, and the entire game engine continues to go off directionless into fantasyland. Sure, BFC promises patch 1.11 and to continue to work on the base code. No one doubts their dedication, but how many untested products can they produce before the game buying public starts to expect more? This consumer has had enough. Say no to 25 dollars for a handful of new units, scenarios and an untested campaign in a format that isn't worthy of your support, and demand a return of the old Operations style of campaign and more bang for your buck. Those new QB maps? Forget about them and bring back the random map generator - in fact, forget about selling us stuff that more talented people out in the community are providing for free. If I want scenarios in which the enemy force's script is telegraphed by the existence of the only gully on the map (wonder where that counter-attack is scripted to come...heads up, Leathernecks!) I can write such dreck myself, and be about as surprised when I go to play it.
Absolute bottom line: BFC needs to decide if it wants to sell a game, or a sim. MARINES wants to be a "gim" and please everyone. It's a time waster on a par with Rainbow Six - a fun platoon shooter that has explosions and tanks. But for anyone looking for a realistic depiction of modern warfare, you'll see too many people shooting through walls and occupying ground in the presence of the enemy to take it seriously. As a game, you'll wrestle with issues of user feedback too often to think of it in the same league as Firefight or simpler combat games. BFC tried to split the difference and expand its market. It failed. Pick a genre and go for it; "gim" is not a word for a very good reason.