A rebuilt Close Combat wargame at Arnhem
Close Combat: Last Stand Arnhem is a real-time tactics and simulation game set during Operation Market Garden. You take either the Allied side, aiming to cross the Rhine, or the German side, working with hastily organized defenses to keep the Allies off Arnhem Bridge. The game is a rebuild built on Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far from Atomic Games and the later Close Combat: The Longest Day. It ships with a gameplay manual, 64 hand-drawn tactical maps, and more than 60 battles, operations and campaigns, including an enhanced Grand Campaign.
Playing together
Steam lists Online PvP for this game, so you can match up against another player and fight over the bridges, river lines and tactical maps. Outside of a match, the group can split sides in the campaigns and operations, or take turns watching each other run the Grand Campaign and compare how the front line and battlegroup reports turn out.
What to know before starting
Battles run in real time, and the strategic layer sits on top of them. You spend points from a limited pool to buy teams from the Force Pool, then manage battlegroups on the strat map: stack them, merge them, lend teams between them, and move them through each other. Front line and reserve battlegroups, static troops tied to specific maps, and parent formation tracking all feed into that. Bridges can be demolished and repaired, and river movement includes both assault and ferry crossings. Aerial resupply gets weaker when an enemy battlegroup sits on the target map.
Fighting happens in daylight and darkness, with flare deployment affecting what you can see. The game reports battlegroup cohesion and fatigue, and end-of-battle screens show campaign cohesion and victory location control. Difficulty level also sets the quantity of off-map support. The scenario editor lets you set starting turns and reinforcement arrival turns, with up to 6 turns per day. The game runs in windowed mode, accepts maps up to 4800x4800 pixels, and no longer needs second-party utilities for modding, with the strat layer, campaign details, support missions, supply and force pool files all open to edits.