Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers [PS2]

Combat Elite: WWII Paratroopers has been riding one rough rollercoaster these past few years. As far as we know, BattleBorne's little overhead action title with a wartime theme was originally under the Interplay umbrella as Airborne: Liberation, but that company suddenly imploded. Shortly thereafter Combat Elite was picked up by Acclaim, which was promptly sued by BattleBorne to halt the release of Combat Elite -- BattleBorne claimed undue payments and won in court while Acclaim was too busy falling apart to fight back. For nearly another year after that victorious injunction passed, Combat Elite sat unattended and totally complete. Now it's finally out courtesy of Southpeak Interactive!

A strange trip indeed.

When I first played WWII Paratroopers so very long ago, I had an extremely positive outlook. At the time, I assumed some presentation and minor gameplay issues such as odd targeting, unpredictable enemy routines and an unfortunate abundance of off-screen damage would be fixed. Unfortunately, none of this happened. The result is a game that haphazardly strings together brief missions with combat that ranges from mildly uninteresting to quite infuriating.

Like Dark Alliance and every other Snowblind powered title out there, Combat Elite is a strictly top-down action game with a fairly impressive graphics engine. It does offer some cluttered, cool urban environments when it wants to and the sensation of being enveloped by a catastrophic war complete with ruined buildings and whizzing bullets is a good one. But while the constrained viewpoint has allowed BattleBorne to fill each environment with a good amount of detail, there are some limitations.

The first is length. Each level is very short and really only features a bit of aimless wandering and a few minor skirmishes directed by objectives like: find guy, find thing, bring thing, and kill man. The levels and their small amount of accompanying descriptive text do little to thrust players into the drama of World War II. Unlike Dark Alliance-type games that encourage development and a touch of personalization, Combat Elite focuses more on the basic allocation of acquired points to obvious areas of specialty without any real drive or meaning. That is, I improve my rifle ability because I can and I have the points to, but I don't really want to, nor do I exactly know why I'm doing that opposed to focusing more on hand-to-hand combat. There's no real difference there.