Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Want to see what it looks like when a tank fires in Operation Flashpoint 2? Well, that’s a specific relief, as that’s exactly what the brief video below will show you.

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The artillery-splattered multiplayer games of World In Conflict that I spent too much of last year playing were quite astonishingly entertaining. The stupendous scale of the fights (NUCLEAR WEAPONS) and the wonderful way the unit-types rock-paper-shotgunned each other kept me absolutely entranced. You should have played this game, especially those of you who don’t much like Command & Conquer. Perhaps it’s the years of deathmatch training in me, but the lack of base building and pure point-capture tooth-and-nail fighting was utterly convincing, and rather unexpected, even after Ground Control. After years of getting stomped in online games of Total War or Dawn Of War, this, finally, got me back into multiplayer strategy.

In fact it’s rather interesting that Massive are gambling that it will even appeal to our net-enabled console chums, with the spectacular-looking strategy find its way onto the PS3 and 360 in the Autumn, where it might just be the strategy our gamepadded chums have been aching for. (Americans, don’t you feel sad to have abandoned such a fine word? “Autumn”?)

Anyway, apropos of nothing much at all, other than celebrating our chat with Massive, the folks over at Vivendi are giving us five copies of the game on PC. You can win them with little more than an email. Interested?
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Discus Games, the brutes that inflicted Phantasmagoria (”the most terrible game which left on PC”) and Harry’s Adventures: Prooves Under Underwear (”the funnyman and the ladies’ favourite named Harry undertakes investigation”) on Russian gamers, are just about to make amends by giving them a surprisingly decent WWII tank sim.

A fresh-from-the-smelter ingot of Steel Fury: Kharkov 1942 can be found here. Play is a little confusing to begin with (hence the brief guide after the jump) but give-up and you’ll miss out on some vintage armour drama. I won’t give too much away, but my first three attempts at holding Sovkhoz Krasny Gigant ended in dismal failure. In one my trusty T-34 toppled into a shellhole. In another I was sniped after sticking my head out of the hatch to observe a trench-line. Then there was the time I ran out of AP shells and resorted to ramming Fascist war machines while singing ‘Konarmeiskaia pesnia’ at the top of my lungs. (With luck they’ll name a Moscow Metro station after me.)

For the Steel Fury basics…

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