Customer Reviews

Microsoft Close Combat 2 a Bridge Too Far: Inside Moves

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Microsoft's "Close Combat" series has been a WW II tactical wargamers dream come true. The realities and effectiveness of World War 2 armaments are surprising to most computer gamers, and thus a strategy guide such as this can be very helpful in not only teaching the fundamentals of the game, but also showing how to apply the concepts of combined armed tactics in a successful manner. Inside Move's Strategy Guide does a very good job of expanding on the concepts described in the game manual. It also has a very nice historical overview of the Market-Garden operation. Small armed tactics are fairly well defined, by outlining how the author fought each set piece battle, and what the outcome of his endeavors was. These overviews are useful if the gamer is playing the stand alone battles, but is useless if playing the operations, or campaigns modes available in the game. (In fairness to the author, he states this fact in the introduction.)

The artwork for the book was very disappointing, with some pictures so small that they are hard to visualize. The deployment illustrations are a little confusing, consisting of screen shots of the playing area, with both German and Allied units placed on the same picture. This results in severe crowding so that in some pictures the units overwrite each other, rendering them unreadable. The final insult is the color illustration on the back cover which is a screen shot FROM THE FIRST GAME - "Close Combat" and not from "Close Combat - A Bridge Too Far"! Obviously this was either a gross editing error, or was the results of a rush job to get the book out to coincide with the games release.

Bottom line is this book will make a good companion to the game manual, but will not make your trip to Arnhem any easier than it was for Monty back in 44.

If you loved the movie, you'll love this.

Sure... there are 3 more titles after this, but this one is a real champ.

What can I say, this book is just simply great. If you need any help in Close Combat 2 just buy this book from this great bookstore.