Bad arcade style (though it claims to be realistic) tank action.

On a recent episode of the best television series on the air, The Sopranos, Christopher is declared clinically dead for a minute. Once back in the land of the living he tells Tony and Paulie that he was in Hell, and that Hell is an Irish bar. Sorry, an Irish bar isn't my idea of Hell but I'll tell you what is: spending an eternity playing Armored Fist 3, with the only food being McDonald's mystery fish sandwiches and the only beverage warm, flat Diet Coke while the Backstreet Boys are blasted through a P.A. system.

Novalogic has a tendency with their series to create some more missions, make one or two changes to the game, and then slap a number on the end of the title, denoting a sequel. For all other companies this would constitute an expansion pack, not a sequel. Yet we now have Armored Fist 3 and not Armored Fist 2.5. A tweak here or there, and a slew of new missions, and that's about it. Welcome to Hell.

Where oh where to begin? Let's start off with the graphics. Way back in '94 voxels were a good thing. You didn't have 3D cards or even many games that took advantage of higher resolutions. Voxels could produce rolling hills and canyons easily, though they were a blurry mess. Fast forward to '99-'00. There's 3D cards coming out that have 64 frickin' megs of RAM on them! SVGA is the standard, not the exception. But for some reason Armored Fist 3 uses voxels for its world, and to add insult to injury, maxes out at 640x480.

This game is uglier than what your grandpa looks like after falling asleep in a hot tub. Take a piece of plastic wrap, smear it with petroleum jelly, and hold it in front of your face. Now look at the world around you through it. Notice how there are no smooth lines and everything is a blur? Bingo, you've just experienced the thrill of playing Armored Fist 3 (and saved forty bucks)!

Both M1 Tank Platoon II and the more recent Panzer Elite have shown us that you can make a tank game featuring long range engagements, and not use voxels. Let's hope if there's an Armored Fist 4 Novalogic finally realizes that voxels are bad. Very, very bad.

Giving credit where credit is due the unit graphics are fairly nice. At least when you get up close and personal. At a distance greater than, say twenty meters from your tank enemy units look like some sort of blob. At extremely long distances you can't even tell them from the terrain. Hmm. They want to use voxels because you can create realistic looking landscapes (realistic if you've taken too many painkillers perhaps) and give you the ability to fight long-range battles. It's a moot point though, because you can't even pick out a tank from a cow, because everything smears together.

Okay, enough slamming the graphics. Onto slamming the gameplay. While there are over fifty missions to play, which take place in a variety of environments and have plenty of differing objectives, they can all be summed up in one sentence. You against fifty zillion enemy units.

Taking the Diablo approach to AI the computer simply swarms you with hordes of units who don't react to you realistically, but rather just plow towards you. Then there are times when they mill about having an Evil Tank social mixer, affording you the opportunity to lay waste to the lot of them. Friendly AI isn't any better. After watching my platoon literally drive around in circles, bumping into each other, I was convinced that Larry, Moe, and Curly were my other tank commanders.

If you take Panzer Elite and dumb it down to its lowest level, it would still be ten times more realistic than Armored Fist 3 on the "advanced" setting. Your M1A2 drives like a dune buggy. I was able to descend into a canyon and climb out on the other side, with both slopes of the canyon being at least eighty degrees in angle. Perhaps the Army now has some sort of super-secret gravity defying tanks now?

The only reason to even consider picking up Armored Fist 3 is for the multiplayer support. While you're forced to play on Novalogic's servers they do tend to be quite stable, and each game can have up to thirty two players and also supports Voice-Over-Net (Novalogic's voice communication package whose mileage varies, but is generally decent). The multiplayer games range from vanilla deathmatching to playing missions cooperatively (oh boy, take on a brain dead AI with your friends, does it get any better than that?). Of course you still have to deal with the terrible graphics and the fact your tanks behave like they're on the moon.

Unless you just have to have every single tank game that comes on the market you're better off diving through the bargain bins for a copy of M1 Tank Platoon II than to shell out the money for Armored Fist 3. Pray that if there's an Armored Fist 4 that it gets a radical overhaul.

Reviewed by Scott R Krol.