By: Slava 'Aknar' Mitroshkov
Date: 2005-November-4
Title: T72: Balkans On Fire
Genre: Tank Sim
Developer: IDDK/Crazy House
Publisher: Battlefront
Tank sims are a rare breed, especially ones focusing on Eastern Europe. Tank sims focusing on small conflicts within Eastern Europe are practically non-existent. One company has decided to take a stand against this genre's lack of quality titles and so T72: Balkans On Fire was born. It's a quality game focused on realism and good-looking explosions.
Even before you start the mayhem, there are roughly 400 kajillion realism options to toggle in the out-of-game configuration tool. Everything from a language filter for your crew members' exclamations to the physics and damage systems, it's quite impressive. Once you get your preferred mixture of realism and load up the game, you can toggle the visual settings for a nice mix between FPS and the pretty stuff. There is a lot of pretty stuff, the graphics are fantastic. Sharp textures, beautiful models, lovely smoke and dust effects, tanks blowing up real nice, everything's there. You can even deform the terrain, real-time, with trench-digging equipment and all the buildings, radio towers, etc are available to be blown up if you've got some HE ammo to waste. It is a beautiful thing to watch some virtual farmer's tool shed blow up, its parts blown into the air and then scattered around the landscape. Sims rarely get this mix of beautiful eye-candy combined with the ability to demolish every structure around you. Huzzah!
Practicing my demolition skills.
The actual gameplay consists of a linear progression of missions with highlights and commentary filled out by your virtual tank commander self in your diary. You load up, strap in, lock down the hatch and roar off into the sunset straight through the closest fences and trees. It is a deep pleasure watching the AI tanks stop, fire off a round in your general directions, then start moving to escape your several-hundred-meters-per-second-burning-hot-justice, run over a tree and then explode in a brilliant ball of light as your shell tears through. Then they bail out, and you can find out what kind of man you really are, based on whether or not you'll give 'em a dose of high-velocity machine gun rounds. In all seriousness, there is some great tank-on-tank action to be had here. When you look down the sights at the enemy T-55, lining up your range-finder determined distance, hearing the auto-loader slam another round into the breech, and hit fire just as the enemy beast launches a round that you know will impact your armor an instant from now, that's fun.
The opposition burns.
In the game, you get to drive the T-34-85, T55, and T72. The upgrade to a fly new ride is automatic after you've done a few missions and torn the opposition apart. The game simulates all aspects of the tank from the gearbox to the sights themselves, which crack if you hit too many buildings (yes, this happened to me, I like tearing through barns) and if an enemy shot hits in just the right place. Most of the buildings you will come across are destructible, which is a very nice touch. The game's engine can support a draw distance of up to 2km, the developers claim, and the actual environments do look very impressive with nice hilly terrain and plenty of places for enemy tanks to hide in. There are all kinds of weather effects such as rain and fog, and the game models wind effects on the shells and such. In an exciting twist, you can also choose to go for full realism and have a limited battery-life for your night illuminated HUD and for the battery that starts the engine. The simulation is very, very deep.
Dust swirls around as I fire.
During the missions, you can be the commander, gunner, or driver. As commander, you issue orders to your AI underlings to fire at such and such targets and go 15 degrees left at this particular speed. Since you start out with an untrained crew, allowing the AI to be the gunner is usually an excellent way to load the same mission over and over as your tank explodes against and again. The enemy tank AI is fantastic and hitting the maneuvering targets is difficult as they stop, send a round your way, and then move again or just stay mobile and send flaming hot death in your general direction. They're pretty accurate too, if you allow them to take more than a few shots they will find the range and turn you into a statistic. One cannot give the same praise to friendly AI, as your infantry likes to blindly charge at the enemy to their deaths and your vehicles (which you, nominally, command) will ignore your orders and also blindly charge at the enemy when that part of the scripted mission is triggered.
The game's mission range from boring rides through the country-side that terminate very suddenly as hidden anti-tank guns put exotic types of projectiles into the armor of your tank, to desperate defense of villages as artillery shells rain down around you and tank destroyers roar up the hill towards your position. While they're fun, there's only 18 of them, and the game only has LAN multiplayer support. The replayability is low for this title, but it does come with all the map and equipment editors you could possibly need if you want to make your own maps. If you've got a good system and a hankering to drive some virtual Soviet-made steel horses through storms of enemy shells and farmers' barns, this is the game for you.
The field of battle.
Recommended specs, straight from the game's website:
2.8 GHz or Higher Athlon XP or Pentium IV CPU
512 Mb RAM
DirectX 9.0 Compatible Video Card (i.e. GeForce FX5600 or Radeon 9600XT)
Sound Card with DirectX 9.0 Hardware Support (i.e. SB Audigy 5.1)
2 Gigabyte free space on Hard drive
DirectX 9.0c
Windows XP SP1