I76 is far better than any of the other combat games for one simple reason--location based damage. Just like a well known pen'n'paper game, armor on each side of the vehicle and each of the components are tracked separately. This is hugely important both offensively (save ammo by concentrating on one side of an enemy) and defensively (you'll need to protect a wounded side, and on longer missions you'll need to adjust your tactics to spread damage around) -- which makes it far far more interesting than Twisted Metal or other alternatives. Moreover the physics is fairly convincing including handling difficulty on rough terrain or with tire damage.
Sadly, whatever dimwit suits were in charge at Activision didn't realize the virtues of what they had so the sequel I82 and all the spinoffs were dumbed down to be like TM and were thus pointless.
Besides the tactical meatiness, which is enough by itself--there is the awesome music, great humor, and nice (admittedly vary sparse) environments.
I'm sorry to say this gog version is not up to the standards of all my previous gog purchases, and that was quite a disappointment. The raw version is unplayable with or without the -d3d option. Fortunately the glide version seems solid during actual gameplay. The menus get glitched color palettes sometimes, the cutscene movies are almost always screwed up, and there is a bunch of rainbowing in the main menu. Still it is totally playable, very fun and I'm glad I bought it even though I still have the original cd's.
5 stars for the game, 6 really, but docked down to 4 for rough edges on this release.