The Wargamer

The Balkans is on fire? Extinguish it with HE rounds.

It has been nearly five years since gamers have seen much of a real attempt at simulating armoured warfare. There have been exceptions; the frantic and slightly less than pedantic tank battles regularly seen raging their way across the Battlefield’s and United Offensive’s of this world. Simulations seem to be rather out of fad these days and tank sims receive even less attention than naval sims, with aerial combat games looking positively elephantine in comparison.

Developers IDDK however decided to take a stab at it. They teamed up with wargame publisher Battlefront to bring their title T72: Balkans on Fire! to the English language market. They removed a few politically incorrect elements to the game, which deals with the otherwise rather sensitive breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing civil war, albeit in a partially fictitious manner in order to facilitate the appearances of western tanks.

T-34 vs T-72. Which one did you say was mine again…?

Their offering features three playable tanks, the T-34-85, T-55A and T-72B, as well as a glut of other tanks and support vehicles to fight alongside and against. There are some notable appearances including the Leopard 1A5, M-50 Super Sherman and BTM-3 entrenching vehicle. As one can tell from the inclusion of T-34’s and Super Sherman’s alongside Leopard’s and T-72’s the game has a wide historical selection of tracked vehicles to play around with, highlighting the fact that the Yugoslav civil war included something of a hodge podge of whatever was handy to kill whatever happened to come over the ridge.

T72: Balkans on Fire! is a hard core simulation, and as with any hard core sim, the manual and tutorials come in pretty handy if they’re crafted properly. Happily for T72: Balkans on Fire! this angle seems to have been covered. In addition to a number of well-designed hands-on tutorials, the manual is very well written. It includes such things as detailed explanations of everything down to different ammunition types and also encompasses handy meta-pages on either inside cover which list all of the keyboard controls in an easy to access place.

We can do great faces, just please don’t ask for any grass

Perhaps one of the reasons that we haven’t seen too many tank sims in recent years is because of the fact that they’re so graphically intense. Whilst T72: Balkans on Fire! will certainly not win any awards for graphical beauty, when dealing in tank terms the designers are tasked with trying to fit an awful lot of terrain and foliage into the aiming reticule. The sheer amount of rolling plain that has to be drawn by a computer for a realistic tank simulation is astounding, and whilst flight sims have managed to accomplish a similar task, generally they display the rolling plains from a few thousand feet and traveling at about 800km/h, so detail is less of an issue.

For a tank sim however, almost every blade of grass has to be modeled across a view distance that can stretch to a couple of kilometers, and when there is a totally malleable map as T72: Balkans on Fire! has then things get even more complicated. Mid-range systems will struggle with the game and require a severe toning down in the amount of greenery on offer.

Cramped interiors

If the exteriors of T72: Balkans on Fire! are something of a functional achievement then the interiors take on the appearance of a shoddy quick-fix. The developers have not bothered to put any atmosphere into the interior of the tracked monstrosities. I found dull and fairly lifeless panels hovering in front of my face, and which showed themselves to be overlays rather than the real interior.

Gamers needn’t bother to try and look around the inside of the tin-can that is a tank; all eyes from the no doubt stoic crews are dutifully fixed on their assigned stations. Unfortunately, there was no attempt made to include imposing and atmospheric sounds of the interior of a working tank. The in-game sounds are lifeless clunks and growls heard both in the interior and exterior of the tank. They are poor attempts, and regrettably let this simulation down somewhat in the realms of immersion.