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.

A German King Tiger tank heads out for the kill.

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]

Soviets launch a surprise attack.

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.