Armored Assault

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: January 07, 2003

Product Info

Product Name: Armored Assault
Category: Massively Multiplayer Armor
Developer: iEntertainment
Publisher: iEntertainment
Release Date: Released
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Files & Links: Click Here

Complex Mix

Armored Assault is a complicated mix of the excellent and the execrable, with contributions from both sides coming from things that come in the box—and also from things that don’t. The best parts promise to make it highly addictive, while the worst threaten to prevent you from getting enough of a grip on the digital needle to inject the gameplay into your bloodstream.

Three of us advance past a demolished factory

Fortunately, the good stuff resides in the realm of the primary gameplay. From the perspective of a tanker, the arena is massive, and by using ten-meter sections, iEntertainment has ensured the terrain has lots of variability to ensure it is tactically interesting for the tankers as well. Armored Assault provides you with a variety of vehicles to play in. The tanks include a Panther G, a T-34/76, the D and H models of the Panzer 4, and the A1 and A3 models of the M4 Sherman. Spicing the mix are an M-16 anti-aircraft halftrack, an 75mm cannon-armed M-3 halftrack, and the humble but vital M-5 troop-carrying halftrack. All of these can be played from either the gunner’s seat, or a combined commander/driver station. For those with their heads in the clouds, you can also fly bomb or cannon variants of the Stuka and an A-36 fighter plane.

A tank explodes on the training range

Numerous airfields, outposts, and villages are spattered across the arena map. You, the player, choose your vehicle, and choose a site from which to start from those owned by your own color—and with a mouseclick you’re in the vehicle and it’s off to the action. By blowing up enough buildings in a site, it is shut down and new forces cannot appear in it. Drive a troop halftrack close enough, and have one of the infantrymen survive the sprint to the site’s central building, and the site is captured for your side. In this manner, the battle rages across the map, see-sawing back and forth. Players in tanks can destroy other players and buildings, while the player driving the troop halftrack is likely to find considerable satisfaction through calling in artillery fire. The whole system works well to give some logic to the battle and to provide players with excellent reasons to cooperate.

Driving a tank means you don't have to pay the bridge toll!

Real Cooperation

And, in fact, cooperate they do. The great part of Armored Assault that doesn’t come in the box is the other players. Your normally intrepid reviewer entered the arena with some trepidation on this score, and was pleased to find that the other players were supportive of newbies and generally inclined to make the fight a team effort. In COMBATSIM’s recent interview, iEntertainment’s president, Wild Bill Stealey, said that the most important aspect of an online game was the player community. They have experience in building games that support the player community, and it shows.

Without other players in the game, Armored Assault is a pretty sterile experience. With other players in the game, it shines; doing your bit to assist a wider group in attaining a given objective forms a very real and very important aspect of the game’s appeal. As the number of players in the game rises, so does the fun factor. And make no mistake: it really is fun. Hours disappear in a blink as you struggle to take or defend towns from the enemy. As a just-in-case, the online arena also comes complete with a couple small AI forces to ensure that there’s always some struggle going on somewhere, even if only a handful of players are present. It’s better than nothing, but not as good as human players.

Infantry move to capture a town

Look and Feel

As you can see in the screenshots, Armored Assault is rather pretty. The tanks look good, and the artillery explosions are very impressive. The modeling makes each tank different. Shermans and T-34s move well, while the Panther is an unwieldy pig to drive, but the Panther’s higher-velocity gun fires in a flatter trajectory. Nonetheless, significant aspects of the model appear to be driven by gameplay. A single turret hit by any cannon at any angle virtually always knocks the turret clean off but leaves the driver’s station functional. Hits on the front hull glacis virtually always fail, but a single shot into the lower rear side of the hull is instantly and spectacularly fatal. Tanks that have lost one track can still move slowly forward in a straight line, and tanks missing both tracks are still mobile as well. Despite these departures from strict simulation, the overall feel of the tank engagements is good. Accurate first-shot fire is as essential in the game as it was in real life, and flanking the enemy is deadly.

Insert Sound Effects Here

View System

Only a few of Armored Assault’s problems exist in-game, and these could be easily solved. When playing as the gunner, it is nearly impossible to tell where the tank’s hull is pointed. When playing as the driver/commander, the best view comes from the commander’s hatch. However, the commander’s view is stuck to the direction the turret is pointed, and there’s no way of knowing which direction the hull is pointed. Switching to an external view is easy and solves the disorientation problem, but a “tank clock” display such as is found in most other tank sims provides a more elegant solution.

Similarly, the “look in any direction” commander’s view in games such as Steel Beasts feels more natural, since you are not constrained to Armored Assault’s few basic quick-look directions (front, left, right, up, left rear, right rear). On the other hand, other aspects of the interface work very well. For instance, using the joystick for large movements of the cannon and a 4-way hat for fine-tuning aim adjustments works very well, and the zoom control is effective at changing from a tight close look to a wide-angle situational awareness view. The latter, combined with a “look in any direction” view and a tank clock, would be quite excellent.

Driving a halftrack through town

Documentation

Armored Assault’s other problems concern its front end and documentation. The documentation is the problem not found in the box, because it isn’t there. The game will link to a manual online, but the manual reads as if it were cobbled together out of bits of manuals for iEntertainment’s other games. It’s poorly laid out, poorly organized, and confusing. A key reference card inserted in the CD jewel case makes up for some of this, yet leaves out some commands and is highly cryptic in many places. There are also a couple of single-player missions, but these pit you against the AI, which has the amazing ability to target you with unerring accuracy through trees that completely block the player’s line of sight.

A Stuka burns

The front-end software also contains numerous gotchas. If you buy the game in a store, you’re likely to install the game and try to find some kind of training missions. This requires you to select “offline play” in two different places, and then to realize that the drop-down menu that already reads “Training Missions” must be re-selected in order to access the menu of training missions. Those missions are good once you find them, but it took me a long time to do so. Once you’ve completed the training missions, you’re likely to look for the means of signing up for online play using the two free months you read about on the box. The only way to do this is to start the game using the CD’s autostart feature. If you start it through the desktop icon, or if, like me, you have disabled CD autostart, you’ll be a long time searching; it took your reviewer around two hours before the solution dawned.

Scanning the horizon for a shot

The problems with the front end are a shame, because they may drive people away from a thoroughly enjoyable experience. If you persevere through the initial difficulties, and can afford to lose large chunks of your life to driving around a tank online, you’re likely to be quite happy with Armored Assault.

A Stuka turns for another attack run

Review System

• AthlonXP 1900
  
• 256Mb RAM
  
• GeForce3 Ti200
  
• Saitek X35/36
  
• Cable Internet connection

Resources

Articles:

• 2002/10/09: Armored Assault (Interview)
• 2003/01/07: Armored Assault (Review)

Files:

• None yet.

Official Sites:

• Official Armored Assault Site

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