Combat★Elite: WWII Paratroopers is primarily a top-down close-combat shooter with some RPG features. It can be played in single-player or two-player coop mode. The game lets the player take part as a paratrooper in the allied campaign in Europe during the second world war, starting out as a private soldier from either the US 101st Airborne, the US 82nd Airborne, or the British 1st Airborne regiment.

There are 40 missions strung together with a narrative, depicting the Operation Overlord (D-Day), Bastogne, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge and beyond - ending in an fictional effort to stop the Nazis from creating an atomic bomb. During a mission, you find medical packs, ammunition (weapon specific), and new weapons as pickups lying around, or dropped by enemies killed - the drops disappear if not picked up in time. A mission takes place on a series of relatively small maps, separated into 'levels', and at the level transition points the player can save the game, and is also awarded skill points, new ranks and medals.

The RPG aspect includes the initial character specialization, and between missions levels the player get skill points, which can be saved for later or allocated between missions to improve various combat skills: Hand-to-Hand, Pistol, SMG, Rifle, Heavy SMG, Stealth, Medic, Grenade and 'Combat Sense'.

In single-player has classic run-and-gun gameplay. You use a player-centered bird's-eye view, and you must turn the character to spin the view as you can only shoot at enemies at the top of the screen, as opposed to the sniper mode, when you use a 1st person scoped view. The screen has a fixed scaling, there is no zoom or free pan, other than to automatically give you a few seconds look ahead when key locations are nearby. The player is kept in the center of the screen and the view window automatically slides over the battlefield as your character moves. Normally, enemies won't fire until they are within your view - but there are exceptions.

In two-player coop mode, each player can shoot in the direction their character is facing, and do not need to rotate the view to hit the enemy. The players cannot be farther apart than the screen size, which is fixed. The screen is centered between the player characters in this mode. If players are far apart at opposite edges of the screen, they can often be shot at from off-screen enemies, as enemies are triggered by being close enough - about half the screen size away on the map, no matter if you can see them yourself.