Tim’s take on Tank Squad

Three of my favourite Tank Squad moments so far. Moment 1. I’m advancing towards a seemingly neutralised Soviet position in a lone Panzer IV. There’s an HE round up the spout in case of unpleasant surprises. A short distance from the position, my tank turns a corner and comes face to face with a lurking 76mm AT gun. The ZiS strikes first, disabling my turret and main gun. When I discover the coax MG is also kaput, I realise I’ve got two options, neither of which are particularly attractive.

Instead of popping smoke and attempting to reverse to safety, I decide to charge the sandbagged armour harmer. Somehow my steed survives another hit and reaches its destination before the Ivans can fire again. Result? Enemy gun and gunners disappear under 25 tons of jiving Panzerkampfwagen.

Moment 2. After losing a Panther to a brace of 85mm AA guns emplaced near a windmill, I respawn in a less precious Panzer IV. Determined not to make the same mistake again, I park the medium tank in an out-of-LoS location, disembark, and, field glasses in hand, trot off to do some artillery spotting/summoning. I haven’t got far when a series of crunching explosions cause me to crouch and turn around.

Himmel! Some jammy Soviet mortarman has managed to turn my freshly issued ride into a miniature volcano. How on earth did that happen? As I watch the flames consume my conveyance and my comrades, an uncomfortable explanation occurs to me. It’s possible I left the hatch open when I exited the turret.

Moment 3. Having seen my previous two Pzgr.39 rounds bounce off the glacis plate of a far away T-34, I adjust my aim and, fingers-crossed, fire again. This time it’s curtains for the dyspeptic dacha. Expecting to see a turret ring penetration, or an impact somewhere around the mantlet, I glance at the slo-mo ‘kill cam’ that appears in the corner of the screen after every hit, and witness instead the fatal AP round racing straight down the target’s rifled gun barrel!

If you’re a Steel Fury or Panzer Elite SE fan you’re sure to enjoy naturalistic moments like these. However, you may also find yourself wishing that DeGenerals’ mission and map designers had prioritised evocation rather than entertainment.

While I’ve had a good time with this £14 tank sim over the past week, and love the realism and ambition it exhibits in several areas (see on), I won’t pretend I’m not slightly disappointed by the target-crammed scenarios, and cluttered and condensed cartography.

Undulating steppe… broad horizons… here and there, villages, ravines, marshes, and fragments of forest. Thanks to developers like Graviteam and 1CGS, many will commence TS’s ten-episode Operation Citadel campaign with a pretty good idea of what the scenery around Kursk actually looked like in 1943.

If your knowledge of the largest tank battle in history came solely from this game, you’d think much of it was fought in terrain ill-suited to armoured warfare.

Vegetation and building heavy, TS maps ensure lots of lively, short-range engagements, but arguably don’t capture the feel of the fighting in the Kursk salient well. Perhaps if the devs had sprinkled threats less liberally, the maps wouldn’t have felt quite so stylised and some missions wouldn’t have ended up quite so long and gruelling*.

* Not being able to save within missions also contributes. Thankfully, once the devs have provided tutorials they plan to introduce saving.

Because you seldom advance far without encountering a new knot of Soviet grunts, AFVs and AT guns, boredom never gets a look-in, but, in terms of pacing, TS sometimes feels more like a WW2 FPS than a traditional single-player armour sim.

Generous respawn rules, and sequential objectives seized through ‘capture circle’ occupation, may also grate with tank sim traditionalists. World of Tanks and War Thunder appear to have influenced DeGenerals just as much as PESE and Steel Fury have.

I’m happy to say, the game’s ballistics seldom elevate eyebrows. On the few occasions I’ve lost Tigers to enemy tiddlers like the T-70, the tiddler in question has been awfully close and the kill cam has usually provided a plausible explanation for the humiliation. Yes, immobilisations seem surprisingly rare, and I don’t recall ever seeing a deflected shot cause damage elsewhere, but all-in-all the penetration algebra seems sound.

Don’t expect great things from Tank Squad’s AI. Although you will lose men and materiel to aggressive enemies on occasion, the scripts used by counter-attackers aren’t especially sophisticated. For example, when a mission trigger prompts a Soviet tank squad to spawn in a certain spot then move elsewhere, the squad rarely seems to proceed with caution, or rethink its pathfinding or tactics if things get sticky.

Friendly AI is a mixed bag too. Summonable support squads require careful babysitting, which isn’t easy when missions are so hectic, and altering the formations and ROE of friendlies, and issuing orders via the map, aren’t options.

Is the high workload DeGenerals way of encouraging players to try co-op multiplayer? Maybe. Having watched a couple of co-op games from the sidelines, sharing choreography duties looks like a very effective way to play.

Unless the devs rethink the inter-mission squad management and AFV repair side of the game, sadly, I can’t see myself spending much time tinkering with tanks or reorganising companies between campaign battles. Currently, confusing menus and shallow repair mechanics mar one of Tank Squad’s most unusual features.

Removing turrets with an overhead crane, and restoring damaged components with a magical spanner, is as deep as the engineering gets.

Ambitious, flawed, buggy, exciting, full of potential… Tank Squad at launch reminds me a lot of Panzer Elite at launch. If DeGenerals devote as much time and effort to improving and enriching TS as they did to improving and enriching Tank Mechanic Simulator, this action-packed demi-sim has a great future ahead of it.