Iron Sight

The turret is the view, and the view is the gun

Iron Sight gives you one thing to point and it is your head. The reticle sits nailed to the centre of the screen and the whole plain swings past it. That one decision is what makes a duel at four hundred metres work: you cannot peek around the side of your own tank, and you cannot hold a target steady while you drive sideways out of a shell. What you can do is decide half a second early which way the hull is going to come round, and the mouse steering rewards exactly that, because a pointer near the middle of the screen barely turns you at all while a pointer out at the edge swings the whole world.

Driving matters as much as shooting. The enemy tanks stop at a fixed range and trade shells, so the plain is not a road, it is a duelling ground with a handful of wireframe blocks standing on it. Those blocks stop a shell dead and they stop you dead, which is the entire reason they are there. Put one between you and a tank and you have bought three seconds. Stand in the open with two tanks ranged in on you and the third shell is the one that finds you.

The scope is where you actually play

The square scope in the bottom left is not decoration. Every live enemy plots on it, rotated into your own frame, so forward is always up and anything behind you drags along the bottom edge of the glass. Contacts further away than the scope can show are pushed out to the rim instead of vanishing, which means the rim of the scope is a list of everything currently inbound. The sweep redraws each blip as it passes, so a contact that has not been repainted in a while is dimmer, the way a real phosphor tube behaves.

The habit the game is trying to teach you is to look at the scope while you are not shooting. A tank that appears at the bottom edge is behind you and closing, and it will move up the glass at a walking pace, which is exactly how much time you have to turn the hull around. Missiles cross the scope in two sweeps and by then they are already at knife range. Reading that little square properly is worth more than any amount of accuracy.

Three things come out of the dark

Tanks are the slow ones. They walk toward you until they are in range, then they stop and trade, and a shell that misses you still tells you where they are. It takes two hits to put one down, and the turret turns amber for a moment before it fires, which is the only warning you get. Missiles are the opposite of everything the tanks do. They are small, they are fast, they lock on, and they kill you in one hit, so the correct answer is always to shoot them rather than to dodge them.

Hulks arrive from the third wave. They are slow, they are the size of a barn, they take four hits, and they fire a pair of shells in a spread rather than one, so there is no such thing as a clean dodge. By then the plain has more blocks on it and the wave is longer, and the score for clearing it goes up faster than the difficulty does. Every hit that lands pays, whether or not it kills, so a wave you survive badly still pays better than a wave you run from.