World War II: Panzer Claws Preview

If you're in the market for a game about World War II tactical combat, you're really spoiled for choices these days. New and upcoming strategy games that fit that description include diverse offerings like G.I. Combat, Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin, Sudden Strike II, and 1C's untitled WWII RTS, to name a few. How do you even know where to begin? Eidos Interactive is hoping you'll start with its own contribution to the WWII strategy genre, a traditional-style 3D RTS called World War II: Panzer Claws. Produced by Germany's Zuxxez Entertainment and developed by Poland's In-Images, World War II: Panzer Claws will try to offer up its own style of military action, presented with a new graphics engine derived from the one that powered Earth 2150 and its follow-ups.

If you've played Earth 2150, its sequels, or WWIII: Black Gold, then you'll likely feel right at home with Panzer Claws. In fact, you'll notice right away how the look and feel of the interface, the camera system, the 3D terrain and unit visuals, unit commands and functions, and most other significant features clearly owe a huge amount to those earlier games, particularly the more reality-based WWIII: Black Gold.

Panzer Claws' single-player game will let you take command of three playable factions: the Germans, the Soviets, and the Western Allies. You'll get two campaigns for each faction, as well as a couple of tutorial missions. Each campaign will let you fight through four missions loosely inspired by major WWII battles. As the German Wehrmacht, you'll fight through Operation Barbarossa, the enormous invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. You'll also get to play out battles on the Western Front during the 1944 Ardennes offensive. Playing as the Red Army, you'll defend Moscow in the winter of 1941 and fight through 1943's massive battle of Kursk. The Western Allies' campaigns will center around Anzio and the fighting in Normandy after D-Day.

While the campaigns give you a limited number of units to employ during the course of scripted events, you'll also get more-traditional skirmish and multiplayer modes with loads of maps and gameplay options. Here, you'll harvest, build, and conquer in the classic RTS manner, with your resource being money that you accumulate by capturing mines and factories and then hoard in "money silos." With your money, you'll build a wide variety of structures, like communications centers, pillboxes, and hangars, as well as a wide variety of combat units, whose production will have certain prerequisites. The US Pershing tank, for example, requires a brigade headquarters and a warehouse before it can be built, not to mention $15,000. [sic]

In fact, Panzer Claws will put you in command of an impressive array of units inspired by history. You'll find Panzer IV, King Tiger, and T-34 tanks, as well as less well-known vehicles like the Soviet BA-20 armored car and the US M5 Stuart light tank. Outside of their appearances, these vehicles are only loosely based on the real ones, but you have to hand it to the developers for doing their research and letting you control more than just the obvious choices, like Sherman tanks. Along with all the vehicles, you'll get a variety of infantry units, like antitank troops for blasting armored vehicles from cover, snipers for long-range attacks, and grenadiers for busting bunkers and tanks. You'll even get to surprise the enemy with paratroop attacks or roast them with flamethrower units.

Each unit gets a few basic stats like attack power against tanks and against infantry, as well as a health bar. You can replenish an armored unit's health by calling a repair vehicle, but getting an unarmed repair vehicle through a gauntlet of enemy units won't be an easy task, so timing will be critical. The same holds true for ammunition resupply. Armored vehicles get a limited store of ammo, with the current amount depicted by a little shell icon above the unit. Happily, you can restock ammo if you have an intact supply dump and a supply vehicle. Guarding and employing these will likely form major parts of your strategy, as will turning the tables and attacking the enemy's ammo dumps or hitting him when his tanks have run low on shells.

Earth 1944

To complement the simplified unit statistics, you'll find equally accessible controls. A simple point-and-click is all you need to send your units off toward the enemy. Once the enemy is spotted, your units will open fire automatically to defend themselves, though you're of course free to pick your targets at will, too. Using a collapsible menu or hotkeys, you can also issue more-advanced orders, instructing a unit to escort another, remain in place, turn off its headlights, or even stop and camouflage itself.

Some special units are commanded indirectly. For light or heavy bombers, for example, you just click an icon at the bottom of the screen to select the plane type, and then you click a target. Your plane will soon arrive on the scene and rain fire down on the unsuspecting enemy unit. This makes destroying antitank gun emplacements a much more palatable proposition than trying to destroy them with a head-on assault. You'll have only a limited number of sorties, though, so you'll need to judge carefully when to employ your vital air assets.

Eidos is hoping that a big part of what will set Panzer Claws apart is its Earth-3 graphics engine, a product of Reality Pump Studios, the descendant of TopWare, best known for its Earth 2150 game. In its day, at least, Earth 2150 was quite a looker. Based on our preview build, you'll likely be able to say the same thing about Panzer Claws, thanks to all the features offered by the Earth-3 engine. The developer is rather boldly touting "an unseen level of detail," because of objects stored "in a format based on the mathematical model of Bezier curves instead of polygons." And just what does that mean to those of us who aren't John Carmack? Basically, it means lots of eye candy.

This eye candy won't come cheaply: The tentative optimum system requirements call for a Pentium 4 1.5GHz and 256MB RAM, as well as a GeForce 3, Radeon 8500, or better video card. (Don't worry: the minimum requirements are much more modest.) Assuming your rig has the muscle, you'll be treated to advanced bump mapping and light reflections on terrain, dynamic skies and real-time weather, and water effects like waves, reflections, and transparency. That's just a small portion of the laundry list of graphics features, all potentially viewable in up to 2048x1536 resolution.

Based on our preview build, Panzer Claws' graphics should indeed look nice, though the claim of "an unseen level of detail" seems to be stretching things. Realistically, you can expect finely detailed little vehicles and colorful ground and building textures, though probably not anything that will take the gaming world by storm. At this stage, the infantry animations still need some work--literally looking a lot like crawling ants when a squad goes prone or moves in unison. Vehicles are rather more impressive looking, with highly detailed textures and swiveling turrets where appropriate. Vehicle headlights beaming into the darkness, a sort of TopWare/Reality Pump visual trademark, also add some visual flair. Some of the combat effects really shine: Explosions, fire, and drifting smoke all look very convincing, particularly for an RTS. Right after a fierce battle, expect to see a graveyard of twisted and flaming wrecks littering the charred earth.

As for the game's audio, you can expect an appropriately martial musical score, accompanied by trumpet fanfares and drumrolls to mark significant mission events. The sound effects readily call to mind WWIII: Black Gold at this point, which means somewhat generic-sounding weapons fire and vehicle engines. One effect that particularly stands out, though, is the crunch of twisting metal when a tank barrels through the wreckage of another.

In time-honored RTS fashion, your units will voice various confirmations to your orders. Units currently speak in a slightly confusing mixture of English and their native tongues, and with rather dubious accents, which is another TopWare/Reality Pump hallmark, sadly. They'll also say things like, "What's up?" Needless to say, that's not the preferred response to a superior officer in the military.

Still, World War II: Panzer Claws has plenty of solid-looking features, and its similarity to previous games using the TopWare/Reality Pump engines gives it a solid pedigree. You'll get to find out this fall just how well the game can build on that design heritage.