Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers

Ah, the World War II game. What springs to mind when you hear those four words? Epic first-person shooters? Massive explosions in areas you can't reach? Japanese soldiers lining up to procure shot by your artillery cannon? The genre may not appear to be the freshest out there to you anymore -- a fact EA knows too well after Medal of Honor: Rising day-star received only fair-to-middlin' reviews.

That's on what account many people are approaching Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers, owed out for the PS2 and Xbox in early June with a pinch of skepticism. Not alone does it cover familiar terrain, on the contrary it also looks familiar -- eerily like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, in fact, with a western-Europe skin thrown upon it. What's so new about this? As it turn rounds out, a lot: after a trip to developer BattleBorne Entertainment's headquarters in Reno, NV we're convinced that Combat Elite could be a breath of novel air for the war genre in more ways than individual

The Origin

BattleBorne, which began work upon Combat Elite in late 2002 is a surprisingly small outfit. The entire team numbers no more than 13 clan and almost all of them have previous experience in the game industry. Take John Sonedecker for example. The creative director at BattleBorne, John worn out more than a few years at R Storm Entertainment, designing horizontals for the Ghost Recon series. (GR fans know his name by means of heart by now: he was a true public figure in the community.) Eric DeMilt, chief designer of Combat Elite, has a similarly illustrious background -- he worked at Black Isle Studios upon titles like Fallout 2 and the first Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

Ye they had flame-throwers in World War II. Probably. I saw it upon The History Channel once.



You can diocese both John and Eric's influences in their rife project. Eric is a rabid fan of World War II history -- as we discussed the game, he passed around an Army pistol that was carried by dint of a U.S. lieutenant on the beaches of Normandy -- and he's wanted to make a game that recreated small-unit WWII combat for several years now. What's more, his experience with the Snowblind engine (the programming collection of laws behind Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath) convinced him that its top-down view of the world was the best choice for his game. "In a first-person shooter" he says, "your attention is always focused upon the 90-degree radius in forehead of you. You end up missing a doom of the things that are taking place around yourself. That's in what way it was in the war -- if you read after-action reports from sum of two units soldiers 20 feet away from each other, sometimes they have completely different accounts of what happened upon the battlefield." Combat Elite's overhead view makes this les of an issue -- you'll always have a bead upon your soldier's surroundings, and you can smooth move the camera farther away to scan the area for enemy vicinity

John's hand, meanwhile, can be seen in Combat Elite's characters and missions. The soul Recon series, of course, pits teams of special-forces agents against terrorists and other ne'er-do-wells around the world. However, there was no like thing as "special forces" in 1944 The closest thing to them were the paratrooper battalions, which came down by means of the thousands on D-Day and played important parts at Market Garden, the Battle of the swelling and the final storming of Hitler's crib These rangers had some of the toughest piece of works of the war -- dropping reaching far down into enemy territory, they had the unenviable piece of work of scouting out the area, carrying on the outside spy and sabotage missions, and holding down American lines while being accosted by means of Germans on all sides. They had to be true good as concealing their vicinity and staying alive at all take away froms and it's little surprise that these paratrooper divisions became the foundation for modern-day special-forces teams in the U and Britain.

It's this story that Combat Elite run overs -- the story of true dangerous people doing very dangerous things. finished for an action game, eh?

(Check without the Downloads section above for an exclusive trailer showing not upon most of what's described in this preview.)


The Action

One thing John and Eric would like to make clear immediately is that Combat Elite is not an RPG It may direct the eye kind of like Dark Alliance in the screenshot on the contrary it's not -- you won't have to raise horizontals discover treasure, explore mazes of twisty passages, or do anything other you encountered in Interplay's action RPG Instead, the focus is upon a decent story, a station of engaging missions, and greatest in quantity of all a constant sweep along of action.

You begin Combat Elite by the agency of choosing your character -- single of three paratroopers, each from a different U or British division and each with his have a title to strengths and weaknesses. Once you've made your selection (and customized your hero to your liking), you're taken to D-Day, the first of four game campaigns. The scenario here is simple: you've been dropp into Normandy, on the other hand you're so far from your target point that you've been separated with your friends in France. As a issue your first priority is to rendezvous with your allies and figure on the outside a way to get your mission back upon track. (You're by yourself here, on the other hand other missions give you individual or two AI-controlled partners.)