M4 By Deadly Games

Overall Rating: 85 percent

Originality 80 percent
Playability 89 percent
Intelligence 86 percent
Manual 81 percent
Graphics 85 percent
Sound 88 percent
Available For: Windows and Macintosh

In the winter of 1944, American troops raced across Europe in pursuit of their German foes. One of the major workhorses of the Allied powers was the American M4 Sherman tank. While not the most powerful tank in the war, the Sherman provided its crews with an optimum mix of offensive power, defensive armor and speed. In the latest simulation from Deadly Games, you and your M4 crew are pushing towards the German interior through France, Belgium and Luxemburg. The column of American troops are following your actions on the point, so you must act intelligently. Various terrain will prove impassable, so each move to your objective must be carefully planned. As you progress, enemy units of all sorts will try to stop you. In tight situations, you can retreat and call in either an artillery barrage or an airstrike. Or, dig in and duke it out with powerful German tanks and infantry units. Each kill you score and each new objective you reach will help bring an end to the war in Europe.
 

I cannot say that I've played a lot of tank simulation games. To be honest, I'm not sure that changed even after I played M4. This just doesn't have the depth and detail that I would attribute to a real "simulation." This is really more like a game of battleship that you play in a tank. I say this because almost the entire game consists of finding your targets and their ranges and blowing them up. Keeping this in mind, this was actually a fairly entertaining game. There were realistic sound effects throughout which added detail to the game. Despite the simplicity, I found myself having a pretty good time playing it for awhile. ---Alex

This is a good game that gives you the feeling that you are actually in a real tank. There are digitized pictures, realistic voices, and, of course, the squeaking of the various parts of the tank. This is one game that has a manual that should be read or you will not understand much about the game. My only complaint is that the game is short, maybe ten hours of playing time. To be fair, there is a good amount of replayability, and maybe in the future we will see some add-on disks. I often found myself getting killed rather quickly trying to find the correct location of my opponent's tank. Load it up and play it. You will like it. ---Rick
 

 M4 is a very easy game to learn how to play. The menus and commands are very intuitive and firing the two guns on the tank is easy. In spite of the ease of play, I found this game to be consistently challenging and fun. It was also quite rewarding to take out a couple of tanks and field guns before they bracketed me. When playing, you need to take the Sherman's various strengths and weaknesses into account. Running from a foe and calling in an airstrike can save your crew, but it may also slow you down drastically. The only problem I had were a few system errors that popped up well into the game, but they didn't stop play. ---Steve