Developer: eSim; Designer: Alexander Delaney; Publisher: Shrapnel Games
Reviewed by Cat91 on 10/11/00

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First Impressions:

Graphics:

I'll get the weakest part of Steel Beasts out of the way first. The thing the pundits have griped about - when they've griped - has been the fact that SB is stuck in 1997 graphics-wise. They're non-3d accelerated, and the only resolution is an antique 640x480. That being said, before you close the door on this feature let me just direct your attention to the immediate right. Y'all, I've seen full-throttle Glide acceleration that didn't look that good. I shudder to think what might happen if Mr. Delaney hooks up with a guy like X-Plane's Austin Meyer and puts SB in OpenGL. Wow. But even in 2d, this game ain't half bad graphics-wise. Consider this: I ran it on a GeForce DDR card with the latest Detonator-3s. With software 4X4 anti-aliasing "forced in all apps." And it ran solid as a rock and WITHOUT ONE CRASH in four solid hours of beating on it. Exactly WHO ELSE has pulled this feat off within the last several years? About every title released by the Great Big Game Houses has required about a thousand patches to even run stably. And SB ran with really good frame-rates; at least as good as I get in Flanker 2.0 in 16 bit graphics and 1024 resolution. Whoa. The color palette looks good, with water looking like water, trees looking like trees, and grass looking like grass. If you could step up the resolution to 1024, even without 3d acceleration, this title would rival a lot of the top eye-candy games out there. Important effects are modeled in the graphics suite, including smoke canisters to shield tanks from view, dust trails, tactically useful trees, and explosions that ain't bad, considering their non-accelerated ancestry. They are varied, as you can't always tell if you've put the bad guy out of action because, as in real life, they don't always burn like mad when you've knocked them out. But sometimes they do, and you can knock turrets off of enemy tanks with your depleted-uranium APFSDS sabot rounds, just like the Spearhead used in the Gulf War back in 1991. Do not pass this up because it isn't 3d accelerated. Trust me-it looks nearly as good as Microprose's eye-candy-heralded Gunship! with a lot more gameplay.

Sound/Music:

It's the best I've seen in a sim. It is obvious that the developer was once an Army man and advised by tankers. It sounds right. You hear the right commands being yelled (I'll hear "Gunner, Sabot, Tank!" in my sleep for the next month), and best of all, YOUR position doesn't respond verbally. Armor is a man's world in real life, so we don't have women in tanks in either Germany or the U.S. to my knowledge. But as gunner, for example, your character doesn't respond verbally (in real life, she'd yell back "Identified!" when the commander designates a target and rotates the turret to it for her), so for the female wanna-be virtual tanker it helps tons with immersion. And you can hear the shrieking of the M-1's jet turbine engines, or the locomotive rumble of the Leopard's diesels as the tank moves, and you look for the bad guys in your monocle. All sorts of sounds are represented-things like the thump when the rangefinder changes ranges, the squeal of the hydraulics when you rotate the turret too fast, the clanging of the gun, the loader's shrill "UP!" to let you know it's time to send another round downrange, and the ZING! of an enemy round just missing your tank overhead, it's all there.

Gameplay:

Let's move on to what I call, with tongue in cheek for the virtual tankers out there reading this, the avionics. I mean the killing gear. Look at the screenshots and salivate at the thermal views. Both tanks are represented, and as you can see, they're radically different. I didn't show you the ability to change to black-on-white polarity in the thermal view. And let me clue you in on one detail: You need this. This is *not* eye candy. See, the bad guys' camouflage paint will let them hide in the treeline, invisible to the naked eye. This is realistic-I've seen real-life tankers do this in the field. I've rumbled up on a laager of tanks and never knew they were there until I got my fire team slaughtered. But they can't hide from your passive IR gear, you can see 'em like coconut bits in chocolate frosting.

That is not all, tanker fans. I consider myself a pretty good gunner. In Falcon 4 I can put virtual BSU-49s into your coffee cup at Mach 1 and 500 feet. But try that when your vehicle is on the move, you're getting shot at, the bad guys are moving too, and they're moving IN THREE DIMENSIONS. You heard that right. Height mapping is present in this game, and when you're peering through your scope, your moving enemy is ducking behind a friendly dip in the terrain just as you pull the trigger. That is irritatingly realistic, and causes you to jump like a cheerleader when you whack that pesky T-72 hiding hull-down behind a rise. And you have to think fast: again, these tanks are different, and in the Abrams you have to master a technique called "dumping the lead." See, you latch onto a bad guy by putting your crosshairs on him, then using the #2 button on your stick to hit him with a range-finding laser. Now your gun compensates for HIS and YOUR relative motion as you rotate the turret, taking into account in its electronic brain the relative differences in velocity. And it remembers that when you pop him with a sabot or other antitank round. So if you FORGET TO DUMP THE LEAD when you engage the next bad guy, you overshoot, tell him where you are, and while your loader is frantically reloading, he is sticking it to you with an antitank missile. "Dear Mom, the Defense Department regrets to inform you that your daughter is dead because she can't hit the broadside of a barn at two feet!" Not only this, but real Army vets have done the single-player scenarios for you, using what has to be the most comprehensive mission and full-tilt map editors this side of Jane's F/A-18. So, enemy INFANTRY is hiding out there, just waiting to introduce you to their friend, Mr. Rocket-Propelled Grenade, who'll punch through your paper-thin side-turret armor and teach you to "respect THEIR authoritai!" Kick that turret around and teach those mosquitoes the error of their misbegotten ways with your co-axial .50 cal machine gun! I'll note that the tank-commander's position is modeled, but it is WAY more fun to be the gunner. The game's editors allow mission-micromanaging programming, and the AI is good enough that you don't have to be the boss. The tank'll go where it's supposed to and find good places to hide without your help, and the virtual tank commander will help you find targets and yell at you to try again when you miss, in a Lee Ermey-inspired Southern drill sergeant's drawl. SB's one weakness is the lack of air assets, on either side. That's its only real gameplay lack, and given the fact it makes up for that lack with modeling artillery in richer detail than I've ever seen, makes it not so important in my mind. Arty includes things as esoteric as ICM-those are nasty little cluster munitions you can call in, and FASCAM, for those times you'd like to spread a fast do-it-yourself minefield in front of the enemy via air bombardment. Don't let air's absence put you off.

Enjoyment:

If you don't run, not walk, to Shrapnel's website you're denying yourself a not-to-be-missed experience. It takes a bit to learn, but it IS scaled in the options, so don't let the fact that it isn't an arcade shooter put you off. Even *I* averaged 75% first time kills on the Abrams range after about an hour's practice. There are a giant number of tutorials and range practice areas to help you learn the tricks and skills you'll need, and the editors are so comprehensive that the game will have unlimited life. Further, patch upgrades are planned for the immediate future that will add more target vehicles and a couple of features that didn't make it into the release. Though it won't be patched forever (it doesn't NEED IT-picture that), it's a heckuva value for the price of admission. I'm naggin' my husband to buy another copy so we can play together.

Multiplayer:

Not tested (I don't like multiplayer games), however Steel Beasts allows IPX, TCP/IP and modem connections, and most importantly, allows in-tank collaboration between a virtual tank commander and a virtual gunner. From what I've seen on the forums, there are very few issues with multiplayer. It comes off to me much like Longbow 2 did. Fans of cooperative multiplayer need to take a hard look at this title.

Overall Impression:

I love it. 'Nuff said.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

Well, we've got to take into account that armored warfare isn't your stereotypical female occupation. But the response from women gamers has already started, and on Sim HQ's Steel Beasts forum there is a one named Tank Girl that's even programming user-addons for the game. There are no female voices, however the fact that YOUR position has no programmed vocals makes your immersion happen as well as it did on Flanker or any of the early Jane's games with the same environment. The developer is aware of our potential, and responded to my request for a look at this game with alacrity, as he has responded to about all the fans, and that's a whole lot more than I've seen in hand from certain big-name studios. Women gamers, *please* support this title. Of all the ones I've looked at, Steel Beasts deserves it. If I've ever seen a title that ought to bring female shooter clans out of Quake in droves and into real-life combat, this is it.