Yes that’s right – there are no playable units for the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan or for the UNITA/South African side in the Angolan campaign – for those campaigns, you can only fight in the T-62. Second, there’s the US M60A1, used by the Iranian Army in the Gulf War campaign. This is used by the Iraqi Army in the (first) Gulf War campaign, by the Soviets in Afghanistan, and by the MPLA’s Cuban ‘advisors’ in the Angola campaign. Two of the tanks featured in SABOW are playable, for the tanksim component of the game. To this, the new version has now added an ‘instant action’ option – click a main menu icon of either a T-62 or an M60A1 and you are pitched straight into a pre-set battle no setting up involved. There is also an easy-to-use ‘quick mission builder’ with which you can in a couple of minutes plonk tanks and other units from each side onto a map and kick off the fighting, largely by-passing the ‘wargame’ element. The action itself centres on three single-player campaigns, following the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979-89) and the middle years of the long Angolan Civil War (MPLA & Cuba vs UNITA & South Africa, 1975-2002). SABOW is set in the later stages of the Cold War. So while nominally a mission report, this piece is more of a tanksimmer's first impressions of SABOW, after playing it on and off over the last few weeks.
And I'm still somewhere along the early part of that big learning curve. This being a combination of a wargame and a tanksim - more about how this mix works for me, later - there's a lot to learn. I have had SABOW for some time, but confess that I had previously been put off by its rather complex-seeming interface and somewhat difficult documentation, both of which received some attention in the upgrade. I recently updated my GamersGate SABOW to the latest version - patches are available on the Graviteam SABOW forums as well as via GG and now Steam - and decided to give it a go. While the latter lacks some of the more sophisticated features of tanksim classic Panzer Elite, it has some nice touches of its own and with the support of a talented modding community, still provides a top-notch first or third person simulation of fighting WW2 tanks in an all-arms battle, at platoon-to-company level.Ĭombining the wargame and tanksim genres is Steel Armour – Blaze of War (SABOW), dating from 2011 and now re-released with the game engine of the Graviteam Tactics wargame. However, as many of us will know, Graviteam have also developed tanksims, not least one of my current favourites, Steel Fury – Kharkov 1942. These started life on World War 2’s Eastern Front as Achtung Panzer - Kharkov 1943 and morphed into the Graviteam Tactics series, ranging into other theatres and periods in the process.
These days, Ukrainian developers Graviteam are famous principally for their PC wargames. On campaign with the new release of Graviteam’s Cold War wargame/tanksim!
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