Codename: Panzers

War games, or strategy games as marketing calls them, are the elder cousins of role-playing games. The very first RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, from TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), was in fact a rule set for a new kind of table top game, squad based, with wizards and warriors. I don't normally play real time strategy (RTS) strategy games, as I find them a bit too hectic, and there is no intellectual challenge in "Zerg rushing" the enemy in many of them. But right now I'm happily playing the RTS Codename: Panzers. Because for a RTS, it is very RPG-like.

Panzers is one of the many new World War II games this year, a wave probably caused by the 60th anniversary of D-Day. You control a general and his troops in one of three different campaigns (German, Russian, Allied). Each campaign has 8 to 12 missions, for a total of 30 missions, plus some non-campaign scenarios and maps for multi-player. You won't finish this in one weekend, there are some serious hours of game play here. You can control a maximum of 25 units, and there is no unit production during missions, so no Zerg rushing (Starcraft term of overrunning the enemy with a large amount of the cheapest to produce units). Instead it is in your interest to keep your men alive, as they will gain experience, and carry this experience over into the next mission. Every mission has a main goal, possibly optional goals, and possibly even secret goals. For achieving goals you receive prestige points, for which you can buy new units, or even buy equipment. Experience and equipment is what makes the game so similar to a RPG.

Combat is in real time, but as long as you are playing the single-player scenarios, you can pause at any time, and give orders to your troops while paused. Graphics are pretty, but this comes at a price. The "recommended" specs are a 1.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a DirectX 9.0b compatible graphics card. If you have less than that, you'll need to turn down the graphics quality. I haven't tried multi-player yet, so I can't say anything about how the game handles lag and such. Unusually Panzers offers not only the usual multi-player modes like deathmatch, but also a cooperative mode, where players work together against an AI enemy. If you prefer confrontational multi-player modes, you'd better wait for one more patch; there is currently a bug which allows cheating in multi-player. But I mainly bought Panzers as a single-player game.

What makes the scenarios so much fun is that you have a large degree of freedom how to achieve your goals. You can try to march straight towards your mission goal, with brute force. That usually works, but taking a longer way might reveal a softer spot in the enemy defences, and also lead to optional and secret goals. Your army is a mix of tanks and infantry, with the tanks being stronger, but the infantry being a lot more flexible. You can sneak forwards, mine a road, then stand up and run away, hoping to lure the enemy tank over the mine. You can shell the enemy with artillery, or call in air support. In the very first German mission you can even steal a Polish truck, load it with infantry, and the more stupid enemy units will think that truck is friendly; so you drive behind the fortified position of the enemy artillery, rush out of the truck, shoot the artillery men, and take over that artillery unit (I basically won that mission that way). You can even take over enemy tanks, after having barbecued it with a flame thrower or molotov cocktail.

Codename: Panzers is already out in Germany, but release date for the US version is the 31st of August. If you want to give it a try, Fileplanet has two demos of Panzers available, each with a different scenario. They are over 200 MB each, so broadband is much recommended if you want to download the demos. Like some other new games, Codename: Panzers is copy protected with a new copy protection system called StarForce 3, and even the demo will install StarForce as a hidden device driver on your computer. As StarForce 3 is a rather good copy protection, some people that like to pirate "warez" are not very happy about that. So they spread some false rumors that StarForce will ruin your computer and can't be removed. But the producers of Starforce are offering tools to upgrade or remove StarForce. You just can't play StarForce protected games any more once you removed those drivers. Codename: Panzers was the best-selling PC game in Germany for the last couple of weeks, which either proves that it is very good, or that the copy protection is really that good. Or both. :)

- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 PM Permanent Link