Review by Tim Still

Name:           iM1A2 Abrams
Publisher:      Interactive Magic
Format:         CD-Rom
Available:      Now

Requires:

O/S:            Windows 95
Processor:      486DX2-66 (Pentium recommended)
RAM:            16 MB
Graphics:       SVGA with 640x480x256 minimum
CD-ROM:         2X (4X or faster recommended)
Soundcard:      Windows compatible recommended but not required

Tested on:

O/S:            Windows 95
Processor:      Intel Pentium 166 MMX
RAM:            32meg
Graphics:       2meg ATI Mach64 Graphics Pro Turbo
CD-ROM:         12x
Soundcard:      Sound-Blaster 16 ASP
Controls:       Std 2-button mouse, MS Sidewinder Pro

iM1A2 Abrams

You've been sitting in a steel shell at combat stations for over 2 hours now, and you're starting to get fed up of it. Your orders were to hold and defend, pulling back only if casualties started to become heavy. With a sigh, you sit back in the turret, and begin another sweep with your binoculars, checking the horizon for the umpteenth time that hour. Just as you start your sweep, you get a call over the platoon net. "Heads up! T-80 bearing 096 degrees!" You swing your point of view to the right direction, and sure enough, you can just make out the turret of the russian built tank moving along behind a sand dune. Following along behind it is another, and then the unmistakable shape of a missile launcher behind that. You give it a couple more seconds, and as they start rising up the dune, you drop back into the tank, slamming the lid down above you, and shouting into the platoon net "Fire at will!" As soon as the words leave your mouth, your own gunner yells "On the way!", and the tank rocks back. A few moments later, the second tank in the line explodes, and then your loader yells "Up!". Shells are now flying both ways, and one of your platoon reports that tank 3 is out. Just when you start thinking you should give the command to pull back, enemy artillery starts falling on your position. That helps speed your decision somewhat, and telling the driver to make smoke, you begin a prepared withdrawal, but not before losing another tank.

Welcome to modern armoured combat.

iM1A2 Abrams puts you in the hot seat of a mechanised platoon, taking command of not only the platoon, but of individual stations within any of the tanks under your command. You can sit up in the commanders position, either unbuttoned up in the turret, or buttoned in front of your electronics suite. Or taking the tank for a spin from the drivers position, or how about taking a few pot-shots with a little 120mm main gun? You can jump to any of these positions within the vehicle, or in fact of any other M1A2 under your command. No other vehicles are accessible in this way, but you do get an outside view of any friendly land vehicle you try and ‘jump' to.

But first...

Let's start at the beginning. When you first install the game, you have the choice of either a standard or custom installation, letting you choose pretty much any size from a couple of meg, to a couple of hundred. Obviously, the more you copy to your hard drive, the faster it runs, as it won't have to keep accessing the CD. When you run the game, you're treated to the customary title sequence. Trouble is, it's not that good. In fact, I'd say that Armoured Fist (a tank sim from Novalogic, a couple of years old now) had a better sequence. Still, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover or a game by its titles, should you?

When you first start the game, you can leap straight into the action with a Quickstart option, or create a commander from the Dossier option. This allows you to create your budding tank commander within the game, giving him (or her) a name, picture, and unit insignia. You can also name the Company and Platoon you will be working with, or just accept the defaults the game gives you.

Bit of a tweaker?

From the front screen you can also go to the Configuration Options screen. Here you have two options. For the normal person, just go through the basic options, changing overall gameplay settings, such as Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, and Expert. Machine speed is catered for using Slow, Moderate, Fast and Very Fast, which sets the graphics options to best performance under your system. You also select control method and audio settings here. But, if you like to tweak things to your own particular preferences, you can go to the Advanced Options screen. Here you select realism settings in detail, broken down into game types, and multiple graphics detail settings, providing loads of options to fine tune the sim to your own personal preferences and machine specifications.

Just before you decide it's time for some serious action, the only other option on the main screen is the M1A2 history. Not a history as such, it's bits from a video supplied by General Dynamics, detailing things such as communications, the electronics suite, and other goodies that are part of the tank. Shame there wasn't more of this, as it's really interesting, and provides fascinating background on the vehicle.

From here you can also set up multi-player games, which can be across a network, modem link or direct serial cable. In this mode, you and your opponents play either co-operatively, all running your own tanks on the same side, trying to accomplish the mission objectives, or competitively, with one player running the US forces, and another running the Russian forces.

Enough, already! Let's shoot something!

Ok, so it's time to leap into the tank, roll out onto the battlefield, and lay waste to the enemy hordes. Selecting either Single Mission or Campaign from the main menu takes you onto the theatre selection. There are three theatres of operation, namely (in order of difficulty), the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, and Ukraine. From here, you can also go to the CIA archives at Langley (no, not to blow them up) and view all the vehicles you might expect to encounter in the field. Each vehicle comes with basic stats and some background info, sometimes with valuable information regarding weak spots, and other things you may turn to your advantage in combat.

When you start a campaign, you first select your theatre of operations out of the three described above (there is no training theatre, which I thought was a little remiss), then choose a scenario. The scenarios for each theatre differ in force composition and starting locations, and length of campaign (if you survive long enough, that is). You can then select your rank. If you choose to be a Captain, you can choose deployment forces from a list, and have control of all friendly forces during the battles, but selecting the Lieutenant tabs for your uniform means that although you have control over the company Team, all campaign decisions are made by higher authority, ie, the computer. What this seems to mean in practice is at the higher rank, you get to choose where you fight, and what units you fight with, and at the lower rank, you can't. A good idea as far as it goes, but maybe it should have been taken further. It would have been interesting to be under the command of an senior officer actually during the battles too, so that you would only have command over your platoon of four tanks, and have to advance or retreat as ordered, providing a completely new dimension to the game. And going the other way, it might have been nice to see things from a more senior level, at least being aware of other battles' results, and possibly even viewing or participating in them. Perhaps listening to the battle as it was being played out, from a command post, or something similar. Just a thought.

Now it's time for the mission briefing. You're told (depending on the mission type), of your objectives, friendly forces under your command, (which can be selected if you're a Captain), and suspected enemy forces and objectives. Then you hit the deploy button, and you're on the way. Stare at an uninspiring loading screen for a few moments, and then you're on the battlefield.

Where's the ignition on this thing???

You start from the Commanders position within the tank (called the Buttoned position). This is where you get to play with the electronics suite that you saw in the video, and will probably be where you spend most of your time. It consists of three panels and a periscope view above.

In the gunners position, you have the Gunners Primary Sight dominating the screen, with a display showing ammunition selected and remaining on the right, a magnification lever, thermal controls, and a small auxiliary sight in the centre of the screen. Usually this location is best left to the gunner to play with, but it can be fun leaping in there during the middle of a battle, and taking a few shots yourself. The gunnery computer does all of the hard work for you. All you have to do is laze the target to get a range reading, and then pull the trigger. It calculates speed of target, shell weight, trajectory, and (in the real thing, anyway) even things such as air density to ensure the shell has a good a chance as possible to hit the target.

The drivers position has less to see. There is the drivers periscope view area, the obligatory facing display, engine controls and display, and that's pretty much it. There is a smoke button, which activates a smoke generator, making smoke pour from the engine compartment, highly useful when retreating at speed.

The only other screen you'll be using is the MFD map display. This is where you can send orders to other platoons, call up support units, such as A-10's or Apaches, and set waypoints for your units. This is probably also the first place you'll see the enemy units unless you spotted them yourself, so whenever you get a report of a contact, you'll see it on this screen. Finally, along the bottom of every screen is a pop-up menu bar, much like the windows95 task bar. This has every order and in-game option on it under a menu system, allowing you to change orders, viewpoints, and various other game settings. Personally, I found it easier to use the key equivalents rather than muck about with the mouse during the midst of battle.

I care about the environment.

The terrain you drive over is basic, to say the least. There is very little terrain detail such as trees, hedges or ditches, all of which can be invaluable to a tank commander preparing a defence, but there are plenty of hills. The vehicles themselves look good, and seem to be well modelled. They sound good too, with main guns going off, incoming and outgoing artillery and rocket barrages, radio reports, engine noises, and the machinery whirring away as you slew the main gun onto target, or turn the CITV to check out the latest contact report, and even the clanging of the hatch as you stand up for a moment to check out a target with binoculars.

The manual is good too, with detailed descriptions of all the tank positions, and all the other information you need to play the game. There's also a few sections in the second half of the manual, telling you about vehicles, organisations of regiments and divisions, tactics and theatre descriptions.

The one thing that lets the game down rather heavily is the AI. It seems fine sometimes, and then very poor at others. For example, I had manually spotted a small group of Russian tanks on the horizon, so I jumped to the gunners position, and destroyed all four tanks. All this time, the other three tanks in my platoon just sat there. Another occurrence was an accident. I'd mis-set a waypoint for a tank platoon that went right next to an enemy squad of BMP's. So the tanks went rolling right past them without firing a shot, and the Russian BMP's also seemed to ignore the four American tanks that just drove right through their formation. It wasn't until I noticed on the MFD map where the tanks were in relation to the BMP's that I told them to specifically attack that target, and the BMP's were swiftly dispatched. Surely in a real combat situation, a tank commander would rather shoot an enemy vehicle than have to swerve to avoid it, no matter what his commander told him?

In summary, then. It's a good game, which is fun to play, but it just seems to be lacking something. Maybe a bit more terrain (although the manual does say that this would put too much of a strain on the processor, which is why they left it out.) Maybe more levels of command. Don't get me wrong, this game is not a turkey by a long shot, but I just feel that it needs a little bit more to really get there...

Maybe I'm just being picky.

Tim Still for Game Over!