The last few months have been great for players who like "strategic" games - computerised versions of simulations you used to have to play with maps and cardboard pieces on your living-room floor. Westwood Studio’s Command and Conquer (reviewed in November) combined futuristic weapons with sophisticated graphics, an easy-to-use interface and a production system that let you try out-building your opponent if you couldn’t out-fight him. Now SSI’s Steel Panthers has arrived - a simulation of World War II tactical combat that is as near perfect a game of its kind as I have ever seen.I cannot pretend to any first-hand knowledge, but this game feels totally true to life. Earlier simulations tend to frustrate because combat troops often like automatons - they fight until killed and move where you ask them. In this game, morale plays a key role - you may not be able to destroy a Panther tank, for example, but if you bounce enough shells off the front of its armour or manage to immobilise the tank, its crew will panic and bail out. If you are lucky you can even rally them and get them to board the tank again and fight on.
Your chance to hit your enemy is more realistic as well - it depends on whether your vehicle is moving, whether theirs is, what the morale of your crew is, whether they are distracted by being fired upon, whether you’ve fired a few ranging shots earlier on and a host of other factors. Needless to say, you are told not just that you hit your opponent, but where - a hit on the side or rear of a tank is more likely to destroy it than one on the front, for example.
With most simulations of this sophistication, the designers tend to concentrate on getting the mechanics right and seem to have forgotten the need to make the games visually appealing. Steel Panthers is not just one of the most rigorously accurate WW II simulations I’ve seen, it’s also one of the most attractive. It works in SVGA - each armoured vehicle, artillery piece or infantryman has its own distinctive and realistic outline and placed on attractively drawn terrain. You can zoom in and out of the map and view a unit’s line of sight with a few clicks of the mouse. As shells land, flamethrowers are used and vehicles are destroyed, the landscape visibly takes a beating, with buildings bursting into flame, wrecks scattered around and shell-holes gradually covering the map.
Steel Panthers allows you bring together any two of the major combatant nations in WW II in battle, at any period from 1939 to 1945. It includes a number of set battles, plus several campaigns that allow you to follow your unit’s progress from battle to battle, gaining experience. You can even design your own scenarios, and some have already been posted up on the Internet.
Of course, no game of this ambition is entirely perfect. There are still a few minor bugs here and there, some of the ways features like opportunity fire have been done might have been done differently and SSI is still working on improved multi-player options which will be offered to all owners at a later date. If you just want a straightforward slugfest, Command and Conquer is somewhat simpler to grasp and less complex, but the unparalleled realism and attractive interface of Steel Panthers has set a new standard that it will be hard for others to match. It’s a classic.