Last year's Codename: Panzers, Phase One was an excellent and innovative real-time strategy game set amid everyone's favorite global struggle (and not to mention game setting), World War II. Unfortunately, it had the ill luck of shipping in the middle of one of the greatest months for strategy games in recent years, which resulted in it being lost in all the heavyweight competition. So much so that we nominated it as one of the best games that no one played last year. Still, Phase One was a hit in its native Europe, and with a name like that, you knew that a Phase Two had to be in the offing.

Phase Two is more of the same kind of fun, enjoyable, destructible gameplay that we enjoyed in Phase One.

Codename: Panzers is a tactical-style real-time strategy series, which means that you don't have to mess around with resource gathering, base building, or unit production. Instead, the focus is wholly on guiding a core group of military units and blowing large chunks of Europe and North Africa off the map. Like Phase One, Phase Two is divided into three distinctly different campaigns. In this case, you get to play as the Italians in North Africa (an oft overlooked subject in games), the Americans in Sicily and Italy, and the Yugoslav partisans. Once again, you'll follow a core group of hero characters as they wind their way through their respective campaigns, and you'll get to read their journals, as well as watch them in various cutscenes. Hungarian developer Stormregion employed a couple of Hollywood writers to improve the narrative in Phase Two, and while the story is stronger than in the original game (with a few interesting twists along the way), it's also a bit corny in places, too. And if you didn't play Phase One, don't worry; the narratives are stand-alone, which means that it isn't necessary to have played the original to understand what's going on. Though if you have played it before, then you'll see familiar faces drop in for cameos during the game.

One of the nice things about the mission design in Codename: Panzers is that there are usually multiple solutions for every situation. If you're tasked with taking a town, you can try a costly frontal assault. However, a bit of patience and scouting means that you can discover a side trail that offers less resistance into the town. You start with a core group of units that gain experience over time, thus becoming more capable. This results in you actually caring about whether your men survive or not, because it's far more valuable to have a handful of elite units than a bunch of green ones. You can then use the prestige you gain during a mission to requisition new units or to upgrade existing ones, which means you can take an elite tank crew and plop them in a powerful new tank, making them even more lethal and giving you a stronger connection to them. After all, it really sucks to see one of your elite tank crews vaporize before your eyes.

Once again, your units are divided into three classes: tanks, artillery, and infantry. However, as with Phase One, tanks remain the king of the battlefield in Phase Two. And if we have one criticism, it's that all you need for the Allied and Axis campaigns is a strong armored force, as well as some repair and ammunition resupply vehicles in order to get through the campaigns. Infantry remains a distant afterthought, simply because they're relatively useless in those campaigns. Yes, you can garrison infantry inside buildings, but structures are few and far between in the deserts of North Africa. You can't crush exposed infantry under your tanks' treads, but the infantry isn't really powerful enough to bother with, anyway. It only matters in the partisan campaign, where infantry plays a bigger role, and then the game takes on a different feel, as it's more about battling building to building in Yugoslav towns and villages and skulking in the wilderness.

Night battles are a new feature in Phase Two, which makes exploding tanks look even nicer.

We've always felt that Codename: Panzers is sort of like a real-time strategy game with cool war game elements in it, and Phase Two doesn't do anything to change this. For example, facing is important in this game, as vehicles have different armor ratings on their sides and rear. Obviously, it's far easier to kill a tank if you can get behind it than trying to punch through its thicker, frontal armor. And if you need to kill a tank, you actually need a weapon that can hurt it, like a bazooka or another tank. You can't mass infantry machine gunfire and whittle down the tank's strength bar, like you do in so many other real-time strategy games. (But infantry can "cook" a tank with flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails, forcing the crew to abandon the tank when it gets too hot.) In addition, you're also allocated some off-board assets prior to each mission, mainly in the form of artillery strikes and air support. You have to ration these assets carefully, and they can have a devastating effect if used at the decisive moment.