It's a sim-cade, old, and a bit clunky, but there's still fun to be had.
The good:
If you were a fan of old Delta Force games you'll get similar vibes here, depending on your playstyle:
There's an endless voxel terrain as far as you can see, you could search for enemies a size of a pixel, and snipe them across the map.
Or peek them from behind a hill, roll out of cover and shoot their tanks before they could notice you.
You don't really want to get up close and personal to another tank, as you'll explode from one well placed shot - as do they though.
Well, you could use the "Lock-on" auto aim feature, which snaps your turret to the enemy and shoots with perfect precision. It comes handy when dealing with hordes of opponents in the later campaigns, but I'd suggest ignoring the lock-on feature, and aim "by hand" for the first campaign or so.
It's a thrilling experience to miss your shot, see the enemy tank's turret slowly turn towards you, anxiously wait for the next round of Sabot to load while you're a sitting duck there. Finally the loader yells "Up!" and you could blow up your opponent just a moment before he'd erase your 20 minute progress in the level.
Unless - if you still have teammates alive, you could continue in their tanks. Speaking of which: your company consists of 1-3 platoons (depending on the campaign) each with 4 tanks. They could be a force of nature, sometimes clearing the mission without your intervention. Other times they all wipe out in a chokepoint, leaving you (and your limited ammunition) alone to finish the mission. You are able to edit the path they take, their formations, and take direct control over them at any point - giving a surprising depth to the platoon management.
Adding to the game's depth you could call an airstrike (on enemies or to clear minefields), chopper supports, turn on smoke to hide yourself, switch between 3 ammo types each effective on different targets and distances, use a thermal camera to scout opponents, your threads or gunner sight could get damaged leavihng you immobile, or effectively blind, and the list goes on. A lot of things you wouldn't get in an arcade game.
The bad:
Auto-aim could lock on a target across the map, while you're about to get blown up by a tank in your face. Better clear everything from afar, before engaging opponents. Another thing is - sometimes you roll to the end of your waypoints, shot everyone you saw, but the mission still won't complete. Some missions have objectives tucked away in some far away valley - without any waypoints. You'll either need to come up to them by chance, call a chopper so it might discover them, or look up a youtube video where to find them.
The technical bad:
The game is meant to played with a joystick, which means a slightest tilt on your controller thumbstick will turn your turret and tank like crazy. Keyboard input feels sluggish as there's a weird acceleration for it, so best stick with a controller still. Another thing is the game don't fully supports 2 analogue sticks: you could drive the tank with the left stick, but the left-right turret turning is bound to the right stick up-down, and there's no analogue input for the turret tilt up/down (unless you switch to Advanced sim mode where the left stick controls the turret in the turret view, but you lose the ability to move your tank in this view). I fixed these issues by remapping a ps4 controller with ds4windows, so the right stick is 90 degrees rotated, and put a macro to tap W and S respectively to raise and lower the turret with the right thumbstick. Also applied a custom (ease-in cubic) beizer curve to the sensitivity.
There's also some framerate and window issues, but they're easily fixed by adding dgVoodoo to the game folder, configuring and running it.
All in all - if you have time and patience to config and learn the game, it'll give an old-school, fun experience that not many other games could offer.
