The focus of the game is the control of the your own tank, but the ability to command a number of attached units (armour, vehicles and infantry up to platoon strength) is given through the use of a command and navigation map. Artificial Intelligence (AI) controlled tank crewmen can man any station and be ordered by the player via hotkey's, or you can take the seat as tank commander, gunner, or driver yourself at any time. Internal and external free motion camera views provide an exciting and dynamic overview of the battlefield.

The game provides scalable realism settings, giving you a lot of flexibility to adjust the game to your own liking and system capabilities. Newbies can set the realism to lower levels to allow them to get the hang of modern armoured combat while the armour grognards will want to tweak weapons performance to their realistic, and lethal, levels and enable all the nitty-gritty details like barrel wear, engine stalls, restricted internal viewing angles, full collision damage and even engine and transmission management and starter battery failures!

Environmental factors are simulated in mind blowing detail with the advent of a powerful and flexible 3D world engine. The powerful physics modelling provides deformable terrain which leaves realistic shell-holes after impacts of high explosive rounds and allows buildings and other structures to be partially or fully destroyed. You can even watch as trenches are dug out of the terrain in real time with the BTM-3 engineering vehicle. Vehicles damage is detailed and various internal and external components can be damaged and destroyed even including tracks getting sheared off.

A full ballistics and armour penetration physics engine produces realistic combat results – including after-armour effects based on precise hit locations, ricochets and glances, damaged and destroyed combat systems and crew, realistic weapons effects, wide assortment of available ammunition types, accurate laser and manual range finding procedures and much more. After each mission, players can explore the battlefield and even review every shell impact with a handy vector overlay display which shows the precise shell hit angle, penetration amount and effect!

Other graphics features include a powerful particle engine, ultra-realistic shadow and optical flare effects, intricate simulation of weather (cloud shadow effects, fog, haze, snow, rain drops obscuring optics, even rainbows), detailed simulation of water surfaces and amphibious vehicles and much more round out the simulation.