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.

Click to continue . . .

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.

Ratings

Gameplay 75
Core Rating 75
Graphics 80
Sound 65
Intelligence/AI 40
User Interface 60
Fun Factor 70
Learning Curve 8 hours
Overall 70

see also the iPanzer '44 Interview