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With only a few good features GI Combat's disconnected and confusing nature will probably make you glad the war is over.

G.I. Combat, a WWII strategy game from developer Freedom Games, puts you in command during the Normandy invasion of France. Your goal will be to secure the inland areas and eliminate enemy forces in the area, leading specialized squads and armored infantry units into battle.

You can play either German or Allied forces in GI Combat. Utilizing several distinctly different types of units from the basic infantry to fully mechanized armored units, players can battle it out to the end. G.I. Combat comes with numerous different options to tweak the game play. You can pick sides, adjust the difficulty and lethality, or select between battles, campaigns, and operations.

G.I. Combat presents a very realistically intended game. It’s designers have gone to great lengths to include very subtle details to increase the accuracy of the game, such as real-life terrain models taken from the actual battlefields of WWII, accuracy in physics and armor penetration, as well as recreations of battles that took place at D-Day.

The problem here is the implementation of these honorable intentions. The game is essentially chaotic, with little or no direction or clearly defined missions given or even inferred by events in the game. You really just have to look around for something to attack. This can take an inordinately long time and add an unnecessary amount of frustration to the game.

When battle does break out, you often won’t really know what’s going on, as finding enemy soldiers is practically impossible. Adjusting the camera angle is an exasperating process and is very difficult to change in a pinch.

The only way to really have constant and complete understanding of what’s happening is to play the game zoomed out far enough to see the entire battlefield. Doing this, however, will mean you can’t see any of the finer details of the soldiers and will basically turn the game into a battle of Allied stars vs. Nazi crosses.

Another problem is G.I. Combat’s awkward and confusing controls and menu options. The different groups of soldier and mechanized units have their own selection bars in the game menu, but are unclear and imprecise when it comes to what each person or group is and what they do. Once you do manage to get them going, you’ll find the units move very slowly and sometimes won’t even go where you tell them unless you repeatedly direct them.

Graphically, G.I. Combat is acceptable, but not all that great. While individual units are acceptably rendered, the terrain and most everything else is rather drab and unappealing. There are some nice smoke effects when a mortar or grenade goes off, but overall there isn’t really that much to get excited about.

You will find a good array of sounds in G.I. Combat. The sound effects do emulate the kind of large scale battle that G.I. Combat wishes to portray. Screams from wounded or angry soldiers, distant explosions, and the clanking of mechanized units are all there and complete. Yet this one well done feature cannot save G.I. Combat’s poor performance.

Overall, G.I. Combat’s disconnected and confusing nature, coupled with a lack of any really exciting production values, makes it rather unattractive and pointless to play. Its problems are glaring and what it does get right isn’t enough to make one interested or enthused about playing it.

Reviewed by Kevin Blanchard, PC Gameworld.