Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Review (no fat)

Game Description

World War II has always been an inspiration for video games, and Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers is yet another title that takes place during this dark and violent era. As either an American or a British paratrooper, your job is to single-handedly take care of the plethora of enemies found across the various maps Combat Elite boasts. Objectives are imposed on you, and surviving the chaotic war soon becomes your priority.

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Gameplay

Combat Elite is a fairly generic game, and does not bring innovations to the genre. This top-down title spans over multiple missions, with each relying on an objective to be cleared. Unfortunately, all the missions in Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers are invariably extremely easy and pose no challenge whatsoever.

Moreover, the objectives themselves are frustratingly simple, as you’ll find yourself performing meaningless operations over and over again. You also have limited actions at your disposal, as you can only duck and shoot. You can also throw grenades whenever you’re feeling in a more destructive mood.

Thankfully, you do get to choose from three characters, who include two American paratroopers and a British comrade. While each soldier has different characteristics, such as stealth and the mandatory weapon handling attributes, and supposedly excels in a couple of specific fields, this doesn’t actually change anything in the game. Moreover, most skills are useless and seem to have been included only for filler. Regardless of who you choose, the game plays the same, as you’re left wondering what purpose the character choice and the skills serve.

The game does give you the option to seemingly upgrade your soldier by increasing his skills through a point system. However, doing so doesn’t really affect your character, and there’s no noticeable change in your performance even if you max out your alter ego’s stats. As you walk from locale to locale, you can also shoot parts of the scenery. It’s not a particularly interesting feature, but it does add some spice to the otherwise dull missions.

To add to its woes, Combat Elite suffers from poor visibility, which is not surprising given the top-down nature of the game. Since you always get the same static view of the action, it’s difficult to assess the dangers around you. Bullets reach you even before you can figure out where your opponents are hiding. The weird camera angle prevents you from successfully coming up with appropriate plans to take down your enemies without getting hurt. It’s not like it matters anyway, since the opposing forces are made up of dummies who can’t even correctly handle their weaponry.

The aiming system is simply forgettable, as you can never get your characters to shoot in front of them. Instead, they will systematically fire towards the top of the screen, which makes things needlessly irritating since you are obligated to move the camera around before being able to kill an enemy. This bizarre scheme gets rapidly frustrating, as you find that you keep losing a lot of time just positioning the camera so you can shoot. That, however, can also be termed the most challenging part of the game and it leaves you wondering why even difficulty is for the wrong reason.

The single-player mode is extremely short, and has absolutely no replay value given the ridiculous lack of options. There are no additional modes and no secrets to unlock, other than attaining better ranks, which makes the game boring in the long run.

It’s basically just a matter of wandering around for a couple of minutes across the ultimately linear maps, collecting med packs, and shooting the bad guys, while struggling against the game’s unresponsive controls (while it should have been the other way around). Combat Elite has an additional two-player cooperative mode, which while somewhat better in how the characters will miraculously shoot in the direction they’re facing, is rather tedious.

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Visuals

Combat Elite surprisingly has excellent visuals. Each mission level is brimmed with details, and the locales themselves are impressive. You do get the feeling of trekking through World War II, as each location is literally splattered with obvious details such as decrepit buildings torn apart by bomb explosions and bullets scattered all around you.

The game appropriately sticks to the era’s mood with appropriate textures, and the choice of the color palette is remarkably accurate. You can fault the graphics only for the reason that they took so much of the developer’s attention that the other aspects got a totally ignored look.

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Sound

While the music is quite good and blends into the game’s atmosphere well, it gets monotonous due to a lack of diversity. The sound effects and voices are merely average though, and the game would have benefited from having more of either.

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Overall

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers fails to entertain, as it suffers from a firing system that constantly gets in the way and prevents it from being any fun. In addition, its poor visibility simply shows how mediocre this title is. Combat Elite is a game deserving a clean leave.

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers Cost

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers currently retails for $69.99 (surprised? So am I).