Combat Mission II: Barbarossa to Berlin

The second title in the Combat Mission series covering the Eastern Front of World War II, from the commencement of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the fall of Berlin in 1945.

Reception

Combat Mission II: Barbarossa to Berlin saw an overwhelmingly positive reception by professional video game critics, averaging an 89 out of 100 Metacritic score based on 12 reviews , 11 of which were marked by the reviews aggregator as "positive".

GameSpy gave the game a 5-star review, lauding the game as "quite simply, one of the best games of any genre available for the PC (and even the Mac!)". Similarly, Gamespot attributed Combat Mission II a score of 9.1 out of 10, denoting that "Combat Mission navigates beautifully between... two extremes" which, according to the review, defined war strategy games at the time, namely "burying [the gameplay] under numbers and hexes or dumbing it down with Panzer General-style levels of abstraction and simplicity". The review concludes that "Barbarossa to Berlin raises the wargaming bar even higher with its pitch-perfect, ultra-polished improvements to an already great game".

The game won both Computer Gaming World's Editor's Choice and Reader's Choice awards for "Wargame of the Year" for the year 2002.