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. On reflection, WWII Battle Tanks – T-34 vs. Tiger was a tad unfortunate. It landed on my desk not long after Steel Fury, and got fairly short shrift (49%) as a result. Perhaps I owe it a re-review. In the meantime here’s my one-page 2007 take.
A combat simulation featuring two of the finest war machines that ever churned turf, slung shells, or shrugged off bullets? What could possibly go wrong?
Rather a lot, it turns out. T-34 vs Tiger deserves a modicum of praise for helping to end a nine year WW2 tank sim famine, but a heap of scorn for being shrunken, shoddy, and shot through with historical inaccuracies.
Set during Operation Bagration – the 1944 Soviet push that drove the Germans out of Belarus and Eastern Poland – the game’s campaign is shorter than Hitler’s moustache. Twelve moribund missions (six Axis, six Allied) huddle together, uncorrupted by frivolous Western luxuries like inter-sortie strat maps and squad management screens. Other bourgeois fripperies like training scenarios, a skirmish mode and single sortie selection, they’re absent too. If you want more than a weekend’s worth of fun, you’re expected to try MP or join the horny-handed proletariat, building extra missions with the bundled editor.
It’s a shame the tools don’t also enable the tweaking of vehicle stats. Call me a luftwhiner, but the titular tanks seem to have been modelled with the Russian market very much in mind. Armour experts will tut and scoff as their mighty Panzerkampfwagen VIs get taken out at long long ranges by titanium-plated T-34s. It doesn’t feel like Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin, which is another way of saying it doesn’t feel real.
Improbable infantry behaviour, sparsely populated battlefields, and poor audio further erode plausibility. If it wasn’t for some intricate interiors and an unexpectedly authentic driving model (try to pull away in second gear or topple a tree with insufficient revs, and your steed will probably stall) the sim would offer little more realism than a Panzer Elite: Action or a WWII: Tank Commander.
Bizarrely, the final coffin nail is hammered home by the sim’s own publisher, Lighthouse Interactive. A couple of weeks after unleashing this metallic mediocrity they thoughtfully released a far superior alternative in the shape of Steel Fury (PCG197, 78%). SF doesn’t have multiplay or the iconic Panzer VI (yet) but in every other respect it’s the superior beast.
