Codename: Panzers review

Codename: Panzers sports one of the most impressive 3D engines ever used in a real-time strategy game.

A tactical situation taken from an US Army infantry manual: “You find yourself advancing through the dense Ardennes forest. Suddenly you stumble across a superbly camouflaged German Tiger tank, and you know that you only have a few seconds before its 88 mm cannon starts shooting your squad to pieces. What do you do?” Answer: Hit pause and call for instant air-support.

Options like pause and air support without delay definitely put Codename: Panzers in the casual end of real-time strategy games, but don’t mistake casual for boring. This is one of the most enjoyable World War 2 RTS games for a very long time and even strategy veterans should be pleased.

From the German to the English front

The developers have really put a lot of effort into designing the missions.

The German version of Codename: Panzers was released several months ago and the game is going to launch in the UK in the coming days. The game harvested an impressive number of awards in the German press, and even though it fails by a very small margin to live up to Soldiers: Heroes of World War II (more about that later), it’s still poised to be a big hit in the English-speaking world as well.

Codename Panzers has three single-player campaigns (German, Russian and Allied) as well as multiplayer support for up to eight players. The three campaigns take place at different time periods during World War II. The German campaign spans from the invasion of Poland to the turning point at Stalingrad, while the Russian campaign focuses on the last-minute victory at Moscow and key battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk. The Allied campaign begins with the invasion on D-Day and tests your skills in critical battles such as Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge. So far no news from the front. However, each campaign centres round a certain officer, whom you follow and thus gives you a personal angle to the war instead of the sterile approach seen in games like Blitzkrieg. Most importantly Codename: Panzers utilises its strong 3D engine to create lots of cut scenes in order to advance the story.

Du u schpeak Englisch?

Thanks to the impressive engine, war feels like war.

The cut scenes are not merely panoramic shots of your units – they take you right down to the officer’s world in a third person perspective like we are used to in 3D action games. However, that’s still very unusual for a real-time strategy game. Sadly the voice acting is terrible (especially the German one, which is an inconsistent mix of German, English and English, with a German accent) and the 3D engine is not flexible enough to emulate the emotions that the story wants to portray due to the lack of facial expressions and fluid movement. Thus the developers at Stormfront have not fully succeeded at adding a strong background story to a real-time strategy game, but at least they’ve made the attempt. An attempt that makes sure this game stays in your memory for a longer time than the standard real-time strategy game.

One must not forget to mention the diaries and letters displayed before each mission reflecting on the thoughts of the officer you play. Stormfront use them to approach World War 2 in a much more balanced way than we usually see and for once the German officer is not just the standard Nazi maniac.

Does this offend your inner general?

Hans, the German officer, whom you play as in the German campaign.

Most real-time strategy games don’t really deserve the term “strategy” as they are in reality a mix of tactics and action and only involve a small group of units. Codename: Panzers is such a tactical real-time strategy game. And it’s very good at being just that. As a commander you can use up to twenty-five units in a mission and before most missions you gain access to a buying screen where you can upgrade, sell and buy infantry, tanks, transports, artillery and so on. Much emphasis has been put on the infantry units, so they don’t feel superfluous as they did in Blitzkrieg. Take the flame-throwers for example. They can attack a tank and with their flames heat it so much up that the tank crew has to abandon their vehicle. Then you just have to wait for the tank to cool down again, and you can take it over if you have bought a spare tank crew. This is not very realistic to say the least, but it’s a lot of fun.

Hardcore WW2 strategist may also be offended by other casual aspects of the game besides heating tanks up. The most profound examples are the weakened guns in Codename: Panzers. Especially the high-calibre guns like the German’s 88mm could in reality kill almost any enemy tank and vehicle with just one shot. However, in the game even a truck can take a few tank shells before it explodes.

Luckily you can pause the game in situations like this.

This creates quite a different game than the cousin Blitzkrieg, but I reckon that due to the very low unit count on both sides this has been deemed necessary. Casual gamers would also have a hard time formulating strategies for one-shot-kill gameplay instead of this more forgiving system. There’s one funny twist, though. The cut scenes correctly show that tanks are blown to pieces by a single shot from high-calibre guns… so it’s not that Stormfront is ignorant of this aspect.

Each vehicle has not only a ‘health meter’ indicating the damage, it also sports four armour ratings: front, sides and back. If an armour rating drops from white to red, your unit takes significantly more damage from each shot coming from that armour plate’s direction. This is a great way to simulate continued fire damage.

It’s all about the missions, baby

Stalingrad WAS really hell...

The missions are probably the highlight of the game. No two feel the same – each has unique objectives and background and for once an RTS felt fresh for me – even after the 20th mission. There’s a world of difference between invading Crete and fighting in Stalingrad. Some missions even have secret objectives, so you have to try to figure out how you can get the extra points. Points for completing objectives can be used for buying new units for your next mission.

Controls are very easy and use a standard CDV setup, but unlike in Blitzkrieg it is actually very easy to control your units precisely. They do what you tell them and they rarely have path-finding problems or get stuck. There’s the array of typical group commands, and you can change the infantry’s stand, occupy buildings, and order air strikes and heavy artillery. The joy of it all is that it works like a charm. My only complaint is a few instances of inconsistency with the use of the right vs. left mouse button for commands.

Not fully mobilized for war

The most impressive part of Codename: Panzers is the 3D graphics engine (Gepard). You can zoom very close to the vehicles and even see working tires and gears, not to mention the great explosions, animations and shadows. Grass and trees even sway independently of each other, and if your tanks take out a few trees, they stay on the ground instead of just fading away after awhile. The level of detail is highly impressive and apart from Codemasters’ Soldiers, you won’t see better graphics in a World War II real-time strategy anywhere else. There are many other cute details and good ideas like icons that display sounds from enemy units that your own units can’t see only hear. It’s those cool ideas that propel this game into the top league of the real-time strategy genre.

However, even though the German version has been in the shops for a while it still doesn’t feel quite finished. The AI is sometimes brilliant and sometimes plain stupid (a group of soldiers lay just two meters away from my tank, but never moved until I started shooting at them). Worse still are errors like the one I encountered in the Crete mission. Here your officer meets his brother, whom you must then protect. But while the mission says his name is Walter, his name is Kurt if you click on him. Those small things just irritate, as they are plain to see and should have been fixed a long time ago.

Codename: Panzers loses the direct comparison to Soldiers: Heroes of World War 2, but only if you are a hardcore player and only by a small margin. If you on the other hand prefer a bit more casual but nonetheless great approach to the genre, Codename: Panzers is the game for you.

If you want to try the game we can highly recommend the two Codename: Panzers demos.