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iM1A2 by Interactive Magic is perhaps the most schizophrenic game I've ever played. It borders both on utter greatness and utter disaster. So much of the game is done superbly and yet in many critical areas it behaves so poorly that the good side risks being totally overshadowed.

iM1A2 starts off by giving you a company to command from within your Abrams Main Battle Tank (MBT). You can give company-level orders from the tactical map the entire time, or hop into good re-creations of the commander's, driver's, or gunner's positions - taking over their functions manually. In the driver's seat you can steer the tank manually, start and stop the engine, start engine smoke, or use the driver's poor periscope to view the area you're in.

From the commander's position, you can stand up with the hatch unbuttoned and raise hell with the heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, use binoculars to survey the area, or just glance around with unrestricted vision. The sit down position gives you the IVIS tactical display, the commander's periscope and hunter/killer system, and well as smoke grenade switches and other related controls. The gunner's position is explained further a bit later. Simulating the tank's crew positions is nicely done, but doing the entire tanker experience justice is another matter entirely.

Lets talk the bad side first: the graphics engine. The game looks merely decent when you have the detail turned up to the maximum. While the tanks and other vehicles look very good, their motion is very stiff and unconvincing. The terrain itself is rather mediocre in its detail. There are very few trees, and the terrain is somewhat flat. Iraq does look like a desert, but so does Bosnia and the Ukraine in the game.

Worse, even on a P200 terrain texturemapping slows the frame rate to a crawl. Without the texturemapping the game's frame rate is acceptable, but everything looks terribly primitive, worse even than the original M1 Tank Platoon. The worst part of the terrain engine is that it is really difficult to get a feel for where the terrain rises and dips. In a tank sim this is totally unacceptable because it becomes really difficult to set up for a hull-down defense, or even guage where there are ridge lines that might be hiding enemy tanks doing the same.

Maybe there is hope: Charybdis has stated that they're investigating the possibility of a Voodoo or Direct3D port, which is likely to help the situation, but they make no promises. In their defense, the problem of creating a terrain engine that both handles very low altitudes (a few feet off the ground) and up to four kilometers distant is no trivial feat. Most all engines do low altitude or long distance but not both. This still doesn't make it acceptable, however. You just can't make a proper tank game with a questionable terrain engine.

The horror continues in much of the interface. While having an "interactive cockpit" that you can click on with the mouse is good, too many crucial commands require several awkward keystrokes to be able to execute. The pop-up menu at the bottom causes trouble, as the game appears to ignore the keyboard whenever it is active. Most keyboard commands are counter-intuitive. For example, if you ever hop into the gunner's chair, you have to re-order the gunner to fire at will every time you leave if you don't want him sitting useless while you address other issues, and the command itself is awkward to enter.

Worse, if you are in the tactical map, and are ordering a unit to attack an enemy unit that is close to one of yours, just the slightest screw up will have your guys merrily blasting their allies into oblivion before you can correct it. Lining up the tank commander's periscope well enough to identify or designate targets for the gunner requires the precision of a brain surgeon - taking at least as much skill as actually shooting the target yourself. The laser rangefinder usually can't pick up hull-down tanks even when lined up perfectly - perhaps the very worst possible time for the rangefinder not to work right.

All is not dark and gloomy. There are aspects and subtleties in the gameplay that are absolutely superb. In these respects iM1A2 is the best tank sim ever made. The tactical game plays well, and is virtually a playble game unto itself. Gunnery is depicted with startling realism. Damage handling is amazingly well done. Gameplay is well done. Campaigns are semi-dynamic. The relationships of the different kinds of vehicles and units to each other and how they work is executed beautifully. The more you play, the more you begin to realize the depth of the gameplay that is here.

The tactical part of the game is the closest thing out to a land-based version of the classic game "Harpoon" - something we've been in need of for a long time now. Here you command a wide variety of units with realistically modeled strengths and weaknesses, decent AI, and a well-developed fog-of-war. You can easily spend you entire command time micromanaging your units moves and countermoves here.

Unfortunately, the interface continues being a bit clunky, and won't allow dragging boxes to contain groups of units. Units on your side choose their waypoints with decent intelligence at the beginning of the mission, an acheivement that mustn't be overlooked when we remember some of the outlandish Tactcom pre-assigned waypoints we've seen over time. What's bad is that units will always blindly follow their waypoints with no AI autonomy whatsoever other than opening fire (after you grant permission). Your units won't seek cover, won't ever worry about outrunning their anti-air cover, etc. There needs to be a way to give your teammates at least as much smarts as the enemy units have in manuever. Anyhow, the tactical section certain can provide many hours of entertainment playing cat-and-mouse with the enemy.

The single best well designed part of the game is the gunnery simulation. I have read several accounts from real M1 gunners on how they use their equipment, and the game provides near perfect parity. It would take too long to explain all the little ways in which the gunner's position was faithfully reproduced, but rest assured that it is the best tank gunner simulation ever done on a home PC. Just for example, there is no magic target lead calculation - The M1's computer estimates the amount to lead the target by how you rotate the turret to keep the sight centered on the moving target after you lase it the first time. If you do a sloppy job, the computer will produce a bad firing solution and your shot will go wide. The equipment can't use this technique to compensate for an enemy closing quickly or running, so putting the rangefinder into "Air Mode" will force it to take three readings (one per second) and combine turret traverse with the change in range to come up with a more accurate firing solution, at the cost of precious seconds.

Damage is handled remarkably well. While you can easily use Sabot rounds to plink T-72s at 3500 meters in the Iraq/Iran campaign, the same tactics will not work so well elsewhere. T-80s, T-90's, and especially T-80UMs and T-95s are very well armored with both composite sloped armor, but with second and third generation reactive armor, which the game models. Your rounds are unlikely to do more than track damage at such long ranges against these modern behemoths. In fact, many times knocking out a tank will require several direct hits at ranges over 1500 meters using sabot ammunition.

If you use up all your sabot rounds, don't even think about trying HEAT rounds against the front or turret armor of the more modern tanks - you'll have to get around to the weaker rear armor to pull that off. As this would imply, yes indeed the game notices whether the shell actually hit the turret, track, or hull, and on what side. It doesn't use some artificial probability formula to estimate the hit location. Too many otherwise good sims are guilty of this.

Enemy AI is pretty effective. The enemy hunts down ridge lines and uses them aggressively for cover, hunkering down and only later poking their turrets above to fire at your company. Many units at risk will pop smoke when you bring the turret to bear on them if they are very vulnerable to your cannon or are trying to buy time for reinforcements. As long as the smoke grenades used aren't hot smoke, you can see through it using thermal image intensifiers, but your laser can't get you the range, and you can't afford to throw away your limited ammunition stores on wild guesses.

One really cool thing about the way the game plays is that there is still hope even when the smoke comes out. If the enemy targets are in a platoon, and one of them is slow popping smoke or ducking behind it, quickly hit it with the laser before they get under cover. If the laser gets a good return, the invaluable range data you've just acquired can be used to rain your cannon fire directly even on the ones still hiding inside the smoke screen. The range number you've picked up becomes the "number's up" for the whole platoon as a result of one unit's carelessness!

Finally, the campaign system is far more dynamic than previous Interactive Magic games. I call it pseudo-dynamic because there is no grand strategic engine working in the background determining where critical points are in the battles and assigning you missions there. Instead you advance or retreat a city at a time, are given a somewhat randomized set of enemy units to fight under one of several possible mission directives. Your own forces are given to you based on what forces are freely available, and how many resource points you want to spend acquiring them for the mission. This is good because it avoids the scripted missions where you always know exactly where to go and what to do, but bad because it is still a far cry from the dynamic campaigns sim fans have come to demand.

Overall, iM1A2 is not for everybody. Its two-faced nature makes it a difficult game to happily come to terms with. Yet what it does well, it does so well that it makes it a game worth seriously considering for those who like their coffee black and their sims gritty.

For the light, action-oriented sim player, it would be best to stay well away from this game unless the terrain engine gets the 3dfx patch and instead wait for Armored Fist 2. For the serious flight sim fan who is just getting into tanks, it would be a tough call, but I'd probably still have reservations against it.

For the ground warfare grognard who loves getting the feel of tank gunnery, iM1A2 Abrams should be just the ticket to tide them over until Microprose M1 Tank Platoon 2 makes its presence known.

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