Codename Panzers Updated Impressions - Early Game

Take a real-time strategy game, which focuses on stockpiling resources to erect military bases and building up armies to crush your enemies, and take what is arguably the most important military campaign of the 20th century, World War II. Publisher CDV helped bring the two together back in 2001 with Sudden Strike, a tactical World War II strategy game that experienced surprising popularity in the studio's home country of Germany. Now, years later, studios are still trying to make the best World War II real-time strategy games around, and CDV's own latest entry will be Codename: Panzers, which has already been released in Europe and has been headlining the German best-seller list.

Codename: Panzers is, like Sudden Strike before it, a tactical real-time strategy game with no resource collecting and no base-building--just commissioning of troops and charging into battle. The game features three playable sides, the Germans, the Allies, and the Russians; each of the three sides is represented in the game by a "hero" unit--in this case, military officers Hans von Groebel, Alexsander Vladirmiriov, and Jeffrey S. Wilson of the German, Russian, and Allied forces, respectively. Each hero unit has various special abilities that can be called into play on the battlefield, much like the hero units you may have seen in other real-time strategy games. And both hero units and regular troops will be able to gain experience levels (assuming they survive combat) that make them tougher and more-accurate shots--and heroes will also gain access to new abilities over time.

Since Codename: Panzers focuses only on battle, not on chopping wood, there's only one real resource in the game: military prestige. These prestige points are earned by defeating enemies in battle and, in the single-player campaign, by completing specific objectives on each map, like capturing or destroying key targets. Prestige points can then be spent on commissioning new foot soldiers, supply vehicles, tanks, and artillery for the oncoming battles--and they can also be spent on upgrades with which to equip your troops, like rafts for infantry to cross rivers. Codename: Panzers has more than 100 different kinds of military units--including everything from Sherman tanks to snipers to medics to flamethrower troops to grenadiers--and all are based on authentic military troops and equipment that were commonly used in the war, with only a few exceptions, like the massive (but devastating) King Tiger tanks that saw hardly any time on the field but will prove to be expensive and exceptionally powerful additions to your armies.

Any surviving units from each mission will be carried over to the next with more experience points, but interestingly, since Codename: Panzers is designed to be a fast-paced and accessible competitive strategy game, you can also build out armies for use in skirmishes and multiplayer play, then save your custom forces and quick-load them when needed. The game also comes with a tutorial and a "training room" mode that lets you take individual units out for a spin to get a sense of what each one is capable of. Once you do get your bearings, you can play the game in quick multiplayer skirmish matches online or in single-player skirmishes against the computer, or you can play the game's impressive 30-mission campaign, which includes such famous engagements as Utah Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and the recapture of Stalingrad. But again, while Codename: Panzers features an impressive amount of historically accurate detail, it's intended to be a fast-paced real-time strategy game that has more in common with Warcraft III than with a turn-based wargame.

This emphasis is apparent in the game's single-player campaign, which is punctuated by dramatic and occasionally humorous cutscenes based around the game's characters, rather than on the war. And just about anyone should be able to appreciate Codename: Panzer's good-looking 3D graphics. From what we've seen, the game's powerful 3D engine does a great job rendering highly detailed individual units, and it also supports some great-looking particle effects, particularly in the game's dramatic explosions and air strikes (which leave cascading plumes of smoke in their wake). Perhaps the most impressive feature of the game's graphics engine, at least in the near-final version we've seen, is that it can handle many units onscreen, let you zoom in and out of the action, and accommodate constant streams of fire and explosions without a hitch.

And as it turns out, CDV and Stormregion aren't done yet either, since Codename: Panzers is intended to be only the first "phase" of what could be a lengthy series of games. While the first game includes operations that focus on European and some Pacific battles, the next game will apparently feature operations in North Africa, along with expanded multiplayer options. The European version of the game is already available to the public, but if the US version can live up to its full potential, then Codename: Panzers will be one of the most promising, exciting, and good-looking World War II strategy games yet.