I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find an approbatory appraisal of Steel Armor: Blaze of War, a 2011 tank sim that bypassed the beaten track.
Can’t decide whether to spend the last of your Christmas money on a top-notch military vehicle simulation or a fine military strategy game? I’ve excellent news. The fitters at Graviteam have mounted the turret of a high-fidelity tank sim on the chassis of a two-layer wargame and called the resulting bridge-buckler Steel Armor: Blaze of War.
The missions in SABOW’s four operations weren’t handmade by a sun-starved Ukrainian called Sergey. You generate them yourself by moving platoon counters around a gridded map. When two opposing platoons meet, a skirmish is spawned – a skirmish that also drags in nearby platoons and neighbouring grid squares. It’s a little like Total War’s battle generation system except the battlefields are portions of one vast seamless 3D arena.
The great thing about this groundbreaking approach is that you end up playing three intertwined games simultaneously. On the chess-like op map you’re attempting to capture victory squares and ensure your units don’t get cut off from repair and resupply (game #1). When skirmishes start you squeeze into your scrupulously modeled T-62 or M60A1 and do your bit as commander, gunner, driver, or loader (game #2), pausing now and again to give orders to infantry and support squads via a traditional RTS-style interface (game #3).
Because the results of skirmishes feed back into the strat layer, and strat layer screw-ups and successes impact the skirmishes, you are truly the master of your own fate. The power is intoxicating, the responsibility sobering. Allow a tank platoon to become encircled on the ops map, and you may find yourself staring forlornly at an empty ammo rack halfway through a firefight. Failed to keep scout or motorised infantry platoons in adjacent squares to heavy armour? You’ll kick yourself when you realise you’re going to have to probe that suspiciously quiet hamlet with 40 tonnes of short-sighted steel rhino.
SABOWs scraps might not look or sound amazing (visually, the engine hasn’t changed much since Steel Fury days) but the glorious unpredictability and generous dollops of realism make the fust easy to bear. Graviteam are ballistic boffins as you’ll see when, post-aggro, you wander a battlefield examining the annotated penetration arrows sprouting from the hulks of unfortunate AFVs.
They are also incorrigible eccentrics. Setting your sim in three NATO-free Eighties conflicts (Angola, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan) is a sure-fire way to cause publisher palpitations.
Personally, I think the settings are inspired. After a diet dominated by bocage and steppe, fighting across the irrigation ditches and berms of Iraq, and through the poppyfields and walled compounds of Afghanistan feels oh-so fresh.
Less invigorating is the spotty documentation. Those familiar with Steel Fury and Achtung Panzer will have no trouble acclimatising. Others will need to peruse pdfs and print key lists to get the most out of the most innovative combat sim in years.
I’ve had the Demo installed for the past 18 months (13/06/2023 16:21). I only ran it once, finding it reasonably good-looking but obviously needing me to put some effort in to make sense of – there was a lot of going back into options to look up keybinds. Whereever I had spawned in was lifeless, so I shot some dirt and drove around a bit. Then I left it running, and when I came back to it it was to find a smoking wreck.
Typing “steel arm” into my browser address bar shows I looked at the Steam Guides page and searched YouTube, finding a Basics and Intro video, probably unwatched. That’s as far as I got.
tl;dr – There exists a demo that works in Win10
I picked this up on a whim a while back, probably off the back of a Flare Path article! According to Steam I have ten hours play time but some of that must have been sat in the menu as I don’t recall playing for long. It’s currently gathering dust, but is on a long list of games I need to revisit (I really should stop buying games…)
I actually really liked it, I found the game quite immersive, I loved the details inside the tanks, and being able to unbutton to take a look around. But found the clucky UI, lack of any tutorial or instructions made it hard to get into. I have sadly found the other graviteam games the same actually I really want to love them, and know they are fantastic , burgh argh the UI! Hard to get past. That said I did enjoy just driving around and roleplaying being a tank driver, definitely felt quite authentic, and I loved the randomness of it actually, every time I attempted one of the missions there were wildly different outcomes.
I wish gunner heat pc, had interior views like steel armour, I really think it adds to the immersion and realism.
I am still searching for the holy grail of wargaming, something that has the creativity , tactical depth and historical accuracy of some of the independent efforts, but a big budget to go with it. As I have said previously broken arrow is the closest so far, but that definitely leans more towards arcadey. With a bit of luck Slitherine can pump some money into battlefront and update the engine for combat missions
I’ll join the choir to say this is a game I have in my library, have a few hours in, and can barely remember it. It’s also the only Graviteam title in my library, so maybe I should give it a more dedicated go here. I must have bounced off the interface early on…
Between continual rounds of Combat Mission Beyond Normandy and Unity of Command 2 I have to confess I’m rather tired of stomping around Europe.
However, I have yet to tap the infantry update for Gunner HEAT PC, which has previously rewarded me as a very accessible angry-house playground.