I got the game in the post today, installed it (manually, since the installer refuses to work on a non-Win95 system) and the patch.
First impressions aren't too bad actually. Certainly a LOT better than Spearhead in both realism and graphics though that's not saying much! It's certainly better than I expected, and for £1.60 including P&P it was worth trying IMHO.
It seems rather reminiscent of Steel Beasts in both graphical appearance (though SB has higher-res vehicle skins) and in the strategic map mode, where you can give orders to other vehicles/troops and switch between tanks.
As far as I know, the only drivable tanks are the Sherman, T-34 and Panther. There is a campaign (non-dynamic AFAIK, though I haven't started one yet) for US, Soviet and German forces as well as a quick mission generator which is a bit like IL-2's; pick a region, then the friendly and enemy vehicle types and quantities.
Not sure about the realism level - in particular, shells seem to have far too flat a trajectory, distant targets can be knocked out with very little vertical lead (or whatever the technical term is).
The vehicle set is a bit limited as well; there isn't a Tiger, for a start (bizarre for a WW2 tank sim to leave out what's
probably the most well-known tank of the war) and other significant types such as the IS-2 and Stuart are missing. (Though the game's model of a T-34/85 looks rather more like an IS-2 to me!) Still a lot better than "Armoured Assault" in this respect though
It runs OK in Direct3D accelerated mode, on WinXP after some tweaking of the game's .ini file, however there are some annoying graphical glitches - some
terrain polygons are blank, and random brown polygons sometimes appear in the internal views, usually right across your field of vision.
I haven't tried any serious missions or the campaign yet, just the "shooting gallery" quick mission.
