Some time last year I reviewed iMagic's iM1A2 Abrams and I
described it as a game with two personalities: "it bordered
on utter greatness and utter disaster." iMagic's iPanzer
'44 is very similar. It does some things amazingly well,
and does other things very poorly. Like iM1A2 it can be
very entertaining, but let's take a closer look at those
strengths and weaknesses first.
The game employs a good selection of unit types that form a
solid cross-section of those frequently encountered in
battle. Worth special note are the representation of tank
destroyers, field guns, and various infantry units. Each
unit has separate armor protection for each side of the
turret and hull. Each vehicle has its own gun elevation and
traverse limitations (for field guns and tank destroyers)
modeled.
Unfortunately, some of the more exotic tanks, like the
Tiger, the Firefly, and the IS-III are not represented in
the game. Also worth noting is the wide variety of infantry
units available. They may be odd-looking polygon men, but
the variety of infantry units is incredibly strong.
As far as the tank graphics go, the units look decent,
although some of the 3d models seem a little out of
proportion. The surface texturing seems to do a good job
driving home how roughly constructed and painted the tanks
of the era were as well. Unfortunately, the vehicles move
in a very stiff fashion. Seeing them undulate on their
suspension as we have been treated to in M1TP2 would be a
nice touch to make the tanks feel more like real vehicles.
Also, a few tanks have their animated wheel textures
turning the wrong way. One very nice touch is that the
diesel engines can spew a lot of smoke when starting up,
grinding up a hill, or struggling with a patch of rough
terrain, and that runs the risk of giving away your
position. It's an interesting twist, although it would seem
that the American gasoline-powered units should put out
less smoke than their foreign counterparts.
The graphics engine has been greatly improved since iM1A2.
Terrain scaling and readability appear to be very good. You
can really see the shape of terrain and get a sense of
distance in the graphics engine. Many individual trees may
litter the landscape if you turn that feature on. Also
there are the typical "forest blocks" as in M1TP2 that
prevent passage. While the distance you can view and its
accuracy are not as good as M1TP2, it must be said that the
terrain engine is still much better than other ground
warfare simulations.
What's interesting about the forest blocks is that they are
layered. In other words, there is an outside belt of trees
in front of the actual block. This is interesting in two
major ways. First, since you can see between the trees on
the outside layer, you get at least a little sense of depth
to the forest, which is a welcome change. Perhaps more
interesting is that while vehicles cannot move on this
"forest sidewalk", infantry can use it just fine. It
provides excellent cover for infantry units that use it,
although it's not clear how much of an effect this has on
enemy AI. Hopefully it provides infantry with very good
cover against enemy units, which can certainly make
infantry play a larger role.
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The terrain graphics are very good, but like iM1A2, the
engine is terribly slow. To get a relatively smooth
framerate on a Pentium without the benefit of a 3d
accelerator, you will probably have to shut off all the
terrain texture mapping, which will eliminate most of the
benefit of the new graphics engine.
Graphics incidental effects are also weak in their
execution. Explosions are very primitive and abstract.
Explosive debris looks more like a stuttering fountain of
particles than chunks of armor and parts being blown off.
Deployed smoke is a translucent grey igloo. Smoke effects
from fire are a series of semi-transparent circles. The way
the smoke spews from a vehicle on fire is much more dynamic
than the static smoke of M1TP2, but it hurts framerate a
lot and so might be better left off.
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3dfx is something of a struggle on iPanzer. It appears to
be common for 3dfx owners who select D3D rendering to get
refused because the game thinks the hardware doesn't
support fogging and filtering. Naturally, this isn't true
of the 3dfx cards. However, it is true for cards such as
the Millenium and a few other 2d cards with primitive 3d
abilities - so I suspect that perhaps the game is trying to
access the wrong 3d card (but that's just a guess).
Most D3D games poll the system for a list of drivers that
can be used and then allow the user to choose which one to
actually use. Perhaps iPanzer doesn't check the
capabilities of all the 3d-capable cards in the system, or
there is some kind of capability-bits reporting problem
between various versions. It was possible to get 3dfx D3D
support to work on iPanzer by experimenting with some
DirectX drivers, so it can be done. Naturally, this is
something that should be left only to very experienced
users. Most folks would be better served patiently waiting
for a patch.
The gunnery view screen has a unique design that is both
brilliant and flawed at the same time. The gunner's view is
a bit of a "split-screen" that displays a panoramic cupola
view. It might sound a little odd to do that at first, but
it makes a lot of sense from a gameplay standpoint. The
gunner's eyepiece in tank sims simply doesn't provide for
any significant situational awareness.
That's realistic enough, until you consider the fact that
since one player has to fulfill all the roles of the crew,
a real five-man crew would have better awareness. Rather
than having a "magic radar" or some other measure that goes
too far, why not let you look through the commander's
cupola while you're getting ready to line up on another
target?
The catch is that this wide-angle view has a lot of
polygons to calculate, so it creates a very substantial hit
on the framerate. Losing framerate in the gunner's view is
the worst possible place. You need to have the game running
as smoothly as possible to work out the lead on moving
vehicles and see where your shells are landing. This
wouldn't have been a problem if it was possible to toggle
off the cupola view to boost performance when you really
need it, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do that.
Having said that, much like iM1A2, gunnery is the strong
point of the game. The gunsight alone has a lot going for
it. The Panzer, the Sherman, and the T34 all use different
variations on the same idea. Each one has "mil marks" that
are used for estimating range - each with a slightly
different system. After calculating the range, you
super-elevate the gun to match the range marking to the
estimate, try to figure lead on the fly if it's moving, and
then fire. Because the gun isn't stabilized like today's
supertanks, your shot can easily get completely fouled up
if you're driving over rough terrain as everything bounces
around.
A very nice feature that was put in the game to help
compensate for this is a specialized "Halt" command. When
you give this command, the driver stops the tank and waits
for you to fire before continuing. This way you don't have
to manually juggle driving orders or just sit still all the
time. Also of note is that you can force the turret
traverse to move faster with the SHIFT key or fine-tune it
nicely with the CTRL key.
Range estimating by mil marks and the mental calculations
that requires may not be everyone's cup of tea, so you can
cheat and get a "laser ranging" with the spacebar if you
want to keep things simple. You can still do the
superelevation manually if you want, so there's a fairly
nice transition between the relatively arcadish gunnery
modes and the realistic gunnery styles.
The damage modeling doesn't seem to pull any punches. If
you're leading a Sherman platoon and engage a Panzer V
group head-on, you're going to be in for some of the same
treatment real Sherman drivers got. Namely, you're going to
watch nearly helplessly as your rounds bounce off of their
front armor, while their rounds slice through your tanks
with terrible efficiency. Your only hope of survival is to
get an oblique angle and hit their side or rear armor.
(Unfortunately, the game AI doesn't always recognize that
someone manuevering for a rear or flank shot may be a
greater threat than the ones directly ahead.)
When you kill an enemy unit, it may simply stop moving,
explode, or it may stop and possibly spew a little smoke
after a while, so you can't always be sure if you've killed
an enemy unit or if it merely stopped moving. The
relationship between range, ammo type, hit location, and
armor effectiveness all feels very good. The manual even
has a detailed series of penetration tables and weapons
data to help players understand how to best employ their
weapons. This documentation is far superior to the
documentation that one finds even in most strategy guides.
The sounds and voices are a mixed bag. The engine sounds
are very good, but they loop in an obvious and somewhat
annoying way. Many of the other sound effects are taken
right out of iM1A2, which is a little disappointing. I
suppose live fire recordings of WW2 tanks is hard to do
these days. At least the original sound effects were pretty
good in the first place. The badly accented foreign crew
voices leave a lot to be desired, though.
Speaking of landing shells, there is a slight error in the
graphics engine regarding shell "splashes". If your
framerate isn't absolutely smooth (which happens pretty
often in the gunner's view, especially when there are
smoking vehicles in sight) then the splash of dirt or snow
that lets you know where a missed round lands may not
appear at all. With WW2 tank gunnery, seeing where your
round lands in relation to the target is absolutely
critical. The manual itself says that it was common for
gunners to need two shots to score a hit. The first was
usually a miss, but the gunner would adjust for the miss
and usually hit on the second try.
The game's AI seems pretty sound tactically, but the
squad-level AI is woefully lacking. The computer seems to
do a decent job of managing priorities and reorienting when
it encounters part of your force. It won't simply rush
everything straight at you if it has defensive orders, but
it will try to send available units to hot zones,
especially once it thinks it's encountered your main body.
I've also caught it trying to sneak units around my lines
when I'd leave the area I was supposed to be defending and
went after enemy advanced guard units.
This is overshadowed by how poorly the game handles enemy
units at a lower level. For starters, the pathfinding
algorithm the computer uses is strange at best. When you
tell a unit to go from point A to point B, the computer
will pick a very strange series of waypoints to get there
as it skirts obstacles. Many of these waypoints will
involve some very obtuse angles that will make the trip
fairly long and expose much weaker armor to potential
attacks.
Also very frustrating is that as you move units across the
map, frequently there will be stragglers that will become
detached. Usually this is a lone vehicle that got a little
too close to the edge of a forest or a tree and ground to a
halt. Rather than going around the obstruction and
automatically rejoining the formation, it just sits there
puffing away and uselessly pushing at the obstruction like
a wayward wind-up toy.
To put your unit back together you need to get in the
driver's seat, drive around the obstruction, drive the
vehicle back to it's unit, and then issue a "reform
formation" command to the unit - it might take a few tries
to get it right. It can be very frustrating to orchestrate
a large scale attack only to see one tank after another
getting strewn by the wayside, each needing to be picked up
and put back on track. If you should come under attack
during this time, the problem gets severely compounded.
To make matters worse, you will occasionally see units come
to a complete halt for no apparent reason in the map
screen. No amount of orders will seem to get it moving
again. Switching to the game world will reveal that all the
tanks have somehow gotten entangled with each other,
creating a dead-stop traffic jam in the middle of a barren
field. Again, you have to get into a couple of the tanks
and manually drive them out to get things moving again.
Also, tanks tend to incessantly pour ammo into dead enemy
soldiers at close range. When a soldier is hit, he crumples
to the ground and dies. However, until he collapses
completely, the AI still considers him fair game. I've
actually had an entire platoon of Shermans empty nearly all
their machine gun ammo into one poor soldier because the
"death sequence" restarts with each hit.
The best workaround for this was to hop into the driver's
seat and ram the poor guy at full speed. That usually gets
the message across to the other crews. Also worth noting is
that the cyclic rate of the driver's machine gun seems
directly tied to your framerate. If you have a pretty fast
computer, the driver's machine gun acts like a miniature
A-10 Warthog gun, allowing you to spew all your ammo all
over the countryside in a matter of seconds. It is
something of a wonder that issues like these made it
through beta testing in the first place.
The good news is that iMagic is developing a patch to fix
most of these problems. To their credit, they been very
honest in taking responsibility for the AI and 3d
acceleration issues and may be able to cure the most
annoying problems. They have confirmed that they are
working on fixing the "entangement" and "hung up on the
trees" problems, fixing the 3dfx card rejections, and will
put some effort into improving the frame rate. Hopefully
they'll consider adding a toggle to the cupola view in the
gunner's screen as well.
Despite it's flaws, iPanzer '44 is currently the best cure
for gamers looking for a World War II era tank sim, but
that reccomendation must be carefully qualified. The game
has excellent terrain graphics, a good gunnery system, very
believable damage modeling, a decent pseudo-dynamic
campaign and tactical AI.
However, graphics anomalies, poor squad-level AI, extremely
high real-world system requirements, 3d card compatibility
issues, and other bugs conspire to limit the game's appeal
only to those who have a strong tolerance for "rough edges"
to a game. As a result, I really can't see an action gamer
or "sim-lite" player getting into iPanzer, but hardcore
tank sim and WW2 grognards with very fast computers should
be able to look past the game's flaws and enjoy the
fundamentally good gameplay underneath.
