Close Combat: The Bloody First was originally expected some time in 2014, but went missing in action and was presumed dead. That is until a few weeks ago when Matrix Games announced that the next installment of the classic World War II-themed tactical strategy game would release this year. So why the four-year delay? Lead developer Steve McClare said that it all boils down to the decision to move from the Unity game engine to publisher Slitherine’s own home-brewed platform called Archon.

The Close Combat series was first launched back in 1996 and it’s always had a purely top-down perspective. Players take the role of a small infantry unit commander and issue orders to their soldiers in the field. Morale plays a big part in every engagement, as do principles like command and control. If you push your men too far, too fast, they can lose contact with their leaders and sometimes even the will to fight.

McClare said that he’s been with the franchise since developer Matrix Games took it over in 2007 and is credited on every title since. With The Bloody First, the goal was to completely overhaul the graphics and refresh the series. The team started out on Unity, he said, but it proved to be poorly suited to meet their needs.

Grid View A map set in Tunisia in Close Combat: The Bloody First. Matrix Games/Slitherine

Matrix Games/Slitherine

This map includes sandy soils common around the Normandy coast of France. Matrix Games/Slitherine



Finally, a greener map that shows more inland terrain. Matrix Games/Slitherine

Matrix Games/Slitherine

Matrix Games says that ammunition will be tracked on a per-soldier basis. Matrix Games/Slitherine

“The goal was to move the game out of the 1990s, both visually and technologically,” McClare told Polygon via Skype. “We spent our first two years working on it in Unity and we were pretty much getting to the end of the project [...] Some discussion happened within Slitherine about whether Unity was really the right platform to release the game under and what other options there were if it wasn’t.

“We were kind of pushing the boundaries with what we wanted to do with Close Combat so there were some technical issues that were going to be hard to overcome in terms of making a flexible engine of our own within Unity.”

Rather than force it, McClure and his team made the difficult decision to port the game over to Slitherine’s new engine, called Archon, which it had been developing simultaneously. The results are impressive.

Today Matrix revealed a gif of the game in motion. Rather than a fixed, top-down perspective the fully 3D environment gives players a the best view of the terrain they’ve had in more than 20 years. It even allows them to rotate the map, something impossible in previous installments of the game.

“The 3D engine doesn’t change the game dramatically, and I don’t want it to,” McClare said. “I want it to feel like you’re playing much the same game.”

He said that the main campaign in The Bloody First will start in Tunisia, the North African theater where the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division first came up against Hitler’s German army. It will then follow the First Division’s battle record, with engagements against Italian forces in Sicily and Germans in Normandy, France. The campaign will end with a series of battles centered around Operation Cobra, the large-scale breakout from the Allied beachhead in France following D-Day.

McClare said that while players will be able to shepherd a single American division throughout the entire campaign, they won’t be able to do the same from the Axis perspective. Players will be able to fight against the Americans but, unlike some previous entries in the series, their progress won’t carry over in the same way from battle to battle.

If you’re starved for Close Combat action in the mean time, check out Close Combat: Modern Tactics. McClare spent a few years building a version of that game for the U.S. Marine Corps. You can even find the old training manual online.