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.

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