Think of this game as a version of Commandos that uses tanks, infantry and experience levels -- to great effect.

User Rating: 8.3 | Codename: Panzers, Phase Two PC
While not a great fan of games that draw on the World War II environment and factions, I must admit I was suitably surprised by Codename: Panzers, Phase Two.

CPP2 is a real-time strategy game that puts you in command of three different factions struggling for ascendancy during WW2--Axis, Allies and Yugoslavian Partisans. Each mission requires you to complete a series of objectives in order to win, and among these the most important is the protection of your general, for if he dies, you lose.

When starting a campaign, you are given a small squad of tanks, support vehicles and infantry units with which to complete your mission goals; completing them all is your only means of acquiring new troops, since there is no base-building here (read more on this below). These are very variable: while the first level of the Axis campaing is a typical reconnaisance mission, you are required on a subsequent mission to destroy incoming waves of tanks by luring them within range of scores of deadly 88mm Flaks.

Tanks are the absolute rulers of the battlefield; you will be relying on them for nearly everything. A cool twist of this game is that you can't mass hordes of infantry and whittle down a tank's health bar with their lousy rifles; to take on a tank you will need grenades, antitank guns, artillery, bazookas, antivehicle rifles or another tank. Period. Also, armor here isn't just more hit points: before you can begin hurting a vehicle you must weaken its armor first. Almost every vehicle has four armor ratings: front, left, right, and rear, with rear being the weakest -- a reason for which flanking tactics are very useful to quickly take down enemy tanks.

On the contrary, infantry is extremely frail; if you think a couple of troopers with bazookas can hope to take on a Panzer, well, think again: you will actually need a dozen to take it out before it turns them into leaky pieces of meat, since, as in the real world, tanks are equipped with machine guns that will make your life miserable if you only have foot soldiers to oppose them. While this could be considered an imbalance, it actually forces you to resort to real-life tactics: garrisoning your men on buildings or placing them on sandbag nests is pretty much the only chance they have to survive the onslaught of a tank. Even when crawling, if your infantry gets caught in the open by an enemy vehicle they will be massacred.

The AI is a matter unto itself. While it can throw up memorable challenges now and then - namely, the recreation of the battle of El Alamein and the defense of the Kasserina Pass on the Allied campaign, both missions on which you must face very adverse odds with mere handfuls of units -, its performance is often disappointing. Most of the time, it relies on you to trigger its response by striking first, but I wondered for moments whether some of the tank crews were asleep as I sniped my way through enemy infantry with little or no response on part of the enemy armor.

After completing a mission, any surviving units will carry on to the next scenario, and you will see a summary describing the level of success of your efforts. Completing all goals (main, optional and secret) will earn you more prestige points, which is used to request more powerful vehicles and weapons. (This vaguely reminded me of the Warhammer 40K tabletop game.) A very cool feature of this game is that it allows you to switch experienced tank crews to better and more powerful vehicles; you will want to preserve your troops as much as possible throughout the whole campaign, since, for example, tanks with elite crews are ridiculously tough and dish out tons of damage.

Purists and gamers with a historical streak will be glad to see the high level of attention that went into the modeling of every unit in the game. Panzers, Shermans, russian T-34s, the dreaded Tiger tanks, scouting vehicles of all kinds, all are faithfully depicted in all their glory with exquisite detail. The landscapes look all great, too - even the deserts everyone loves to flame for being bland and monotone, but hey, such is the way a real desert looks. Seas and water elements in general are extremely well done.

Sound effects are very cool too. Machineguns, cannon fire, artillery blasts, explosions, vehicle engines, even a tank being hit, they are all just great and play a substantial part at making you feel inside the battlefield. I wish I could say the same about the music, though. It is repetitive and monotonous, for the most part, and even the more 'epic' tune played when combat erupts sounds bland and cheap. There is some memorable voice acting, especially if you are using German units: every unit speaks on the language of the army they are enlisted on... for example, a response from the crew of a German artillery piece to an attack order is "feuer frei!" Sadly, this is outweighed by the horrible Italian accents and the unoriginal and cheesy replies uttered by U.S. and British units. (You'll grow to hate the "aaaaaand... go!")

In the end, Panzers: Phase Two is a formidable strategy game that does away with resource management and gets away with it. The quality of the single player campaigns -which is excellent in spite of the mentioned AI flaws- and an amazingly intense multiplayer experience ensure that you will enjoy some memorable moments--which are worth every penny you invest on this game.