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.
