I’d been looking forward to this odd little game, a World War II-era tank combat simulator that uses ASCII graphics. It looks ancient but it’s actually a relatively recent release. Similarly, learning the interface and the ruleset also seems daunting but there’s not actually that much to it. It was a blast to figure how it all works and to experience commanding different types of units. Unfortunately while there are many campaigns to play, they all feel repetitive and similar after a while as the core gameplay loop is really quite simple.

The tutorial walks you through a three-day training exercise using the Canadian-made Ram Mk II tank. After that, you can choose from a large number of campaigns divided into the early, middle and late stages of World War II. You can choose pretty much any side, with a campaign lasting from a week to a grueling sixty combat days. From there, you’re offered a choice of tanks, tank destroyers, armored cars and other vehicles to command. There are a lot of options to set up your campaign but probably the most popular and realistic way is to have the commander be the player character. This means that if your commander is killed, you’re dead and the campaign ends. If your commander is injured badly enough, you similarly sit out a number of days at the hospital to heal. After that, it’s just a matter of loading your tank with the shells that you want and setting out with your crew onto the map. Each combat day starts and ends at specific times so your job is firstly to survive and secondly to rack up as many Victory Points as you can by achieving mission objectives.

Technically there are a number of different mission types. Offensive missions in which you’re tasked with gaining as much ground as possible, defensive ones in which you’re meant to hold ground, patrol missions and so on. In practice though since you just have your one squad of tanks, they play much the same to me. You look around the hex map to note where you can score VPs and head there while avoiding the most dangerous enemies. You almost certainly want to be constantly using the reconnaissance option to have some idea of what enemies are in the next hex. The information you get isn’t always accurate but a large clump of powerful enemies is usually too much trouble to bother with. You start the day with two squad mates and might want to take fewer risks after you lose them. You can also call in air support, artillery strikes and ask for reinforcements to even the odds though these are all finite resources.

In combat you issue orders to each crew member on what to do every turn. So you’d have the gunner manning either the main gun or the machinegun, the driver moving the tank, the loader passing ammunition and so on. Skills and behind the scenes math is used to determine if actions succeed. So just because you order the tank to move forward doesn’t mean it actually will. It might even become bogged down instead. As you’d expect the odds of hitting when firing your weapons depend on many factors including distance, skills, whether you or the target is moving, cover and so on. When attacking an armored target, the attack also needs to penetrate the armor to do anything. So the game really does an excellent job of making you feel powerful when you’re in control of a tough tank. But when you’re facing off against an enemy tank with armor so tough that every shell will just bounce off its hull, there’s nothing to do except pray for a critical hit or run away.

There’s an RPG element to this game as your crew members can earn the equivalent of XP after each combat day which can be spent to improve stats and skills. But of course they can also get injured badly enough to merit a stay in the hospital or die, in which case you’re sent replacement crew. At the end of a campaign, you and your crew can earn medals and decorations depending on how well you’ve done and you can carry your team forwards to subsequent campaigns. In my case, I started as Germany (of course!) invading Poland, went on to participate in the invasion of France and ended with Operation Barbarossa. Despite losing a few crew members along the way, the added skills made a huge difference in power in the later campaigns.

This isn’t meant to be a completely realistic simulator. You have infinite ammunition for your machineguns for example and there’s no need to track fuel usage. Your squad also magically keep up you whenever you move without the risk of being bogged down or suffering from an engine breakdown. It does work well enough to capture some sense what it might feel like. I’m especially amused that bailing out of a tank that has been hit is its own mini-game as it’s not straightforward. Some positions have hatches and others don’t, the tank might be on fire and some crew members might be injured. It really makes you feel that as in any war, your number one responsibility is to ensure that you survive first before trying to do anything heroic or crazy. Sometimes there are random events to liven things up, but it’s usually something boring like your crew members being a little less fatigued. Other times, there might be unexpected air or artillery strikes, either from your side or that of the enemy. You’re just a cog that is part of a huge war machine so you don’t really know what is going on elsewhere and so just do your part.

The interface looks daunting at first but there’s really not much to it and you memorize all of the keyboard shortcuts soon enough. That’s because the game is extremely repetitive. Regardless of what you’re facing in combat, the first few moves will likely be the same unless you want to just withdraw from battle as soon as possible. Once you’re familiar with your tank, you’d know it’s best to try to engage at long distance or to attempt to overrun the enemy. Switching to different tanks or tank destroyers changes things up a bit, but not that much. I don’t think that anyone will enjoy playing the fragile units like the tank destroyers past the novelty stage because you’re very likely to get killed the moment a tank looks in your direction and isn’t immediately destroyed. In the same way, it’s a blast to reach the bail out mini-game the first couple of times, but you soon realize that you just have to do the same set of things over and over again.

This means that while I did enjoy learning and playing this game, it gets old really fast. The core gameplay loop is just too simple and the game is lacking in personality. For example there is some random chatter from your crew members but very little of it. There’s really not much of a difference in gameplay from one campaign day to the next. Even improving the skills of your crew members doesn’t provide enough of a motivation as it’s not difficult to basically max them out after a couple of campaigns. If all you want to do is just to survive, then it’s even easier and you can just hide out and refuse to engage in fights. You won’t earn much in the way of VPs but it’s not like high command will chew you out. So yeah, it’s cool to try new things and I’d bet grognards who are familiar with all of the military hardware will have a blast with it. But I’m done with this after only a little more than a dozen hours or so.