Combat Zone Review

Combat Zone came highly recommended on TMP when I asked about a sci-fi skirmish game, so for £15 I thought it was worth buying the box set. I also ordered two metal scavengers on a whim- we'll come to them later.
It arrived on Wednesday, but college kept me too busy to do anything other than examine the contents and flick through the rulebook. On Friday I finally had the time to assemble the plastics and punch out the walls, so me and my brother sat down and played a game. We played Scenario 2- Robot Rescue from the book. He won, wiping out my troopers with ease. On Saturday we played again, this time the "Starter Scenario", 5 gangers versus 4 troopers. He won again, but took heavy casualties this time.
My thoughts on the game are still fairly undecided. The basic combat mechanisms seem intuitive and solid and pretty fast playing. Roll a d6, add modifiers, 6 or more is a hit. Roll wound dice, subtract armour/cover modifiers, 7 or more is a kill. Nice and simple. Could easily be adapted to other genres such as microarmour or mecha.
Where the system falls down in my opinion is the Action Point system. I blame Space Hulk for the prevalence of Action Points in games- I don't like them. I can see their advantages, but they just seem too anal-retentive to me. I guess that's more of a personal taste complaint though.
Second problem is the inconsistent application of the morale system- you can make someone run away by stabbing at them with a knife, but not by shooting at them with a gun.
Third problem is the fact that you activate as a squad, but combat is all individual based. Thus you end up with situations where the person who wins initiative has their entire group fire at one of your group leaders, killing them in the first turn and crippling your initiative rolls for the rest of the game. Some system for groups shooting at other groups en masse would have been nice.
Lastly, its in metric. Another personal taste thing but I prefer imperial measurements for gaming- less fiddly.
Of course, all of these problems can be fixed with a little house ruling. For instance, apply the same wound-roll based morale system to shooting as to melee. The group-shooting thing isn't that much of a problem, as I bought the game to use for small games of 5-6 men a side, not the larger games the rulebook recommends. And the metric thing is easily solved with a few pencil notes in the side margins.
Overall, a system that shows promise, but needs a little tweaking. Paticular mention should go to the Combat Zone Chronicles, a fantastic resource of modelling and rules articles, which has some really cool stuff on it.

The miniatures in the box were a mixed bunch. I was quite happy with the plastic Troopers, who are well posed, with nice detailing. They look very uniform, but thats ok with the troopers because they're the faceless corporate rent-a-guns. They could have done with being more heavily armed- only two of five have assault rifles- as they're the rich ones with all the tech and gear.
The gangers, however, were quite dissapointing. The quality was mediocre, some of the poses look wrong, and they're just too uniform for the heterogenous individualistic gangers.
The robots were also pretty dissapointing. No instructions were included as to their construction, so I had no idea which arms were supposed to go with which body and the models seemed quite lacklustre in their aesthetics- nothing wrong with them, they just weren't very interesting.

The metal scavengers I ordered were a completely different story. The quality was amasing; the figures looked like a tiny sculptor had just chipped them out of granite, there was absolutely no trash and they were already primed. I've half-painted one of them, I'll post pictures when its done. Very nice models, lots of character.

Overall, a satisfactory purchase and I'll be definetly buying more of EM-4's metal figures.