Achtung Panzer review
There have been so many different incarnations of the last Great War in videogames, but is this fresh enough to stand out among its peers?
Achtung Panzer is a vehicle based war strategy simulator that borrows from everything, from chess to RTS. You primarily play in a top down perspective that has you shuffle boarding your troops across a faithfully recreated real-life battlefield. When you meet the enemy from this table top view, you’re taken into that area of the map where you will fight for control in a capture the flag, real time strategy type mode. Points are controlled by proximity, number of units or military strength.
How you choose to play this is down to player preference, as you have the ability to control everything from an airborne view, as well as being able to control individual units looking for the enemy which are invading your ground unit’s line of sight. Zoom in a bit closer and play in an RTS mode with your lack of vision acting as a ‘Fog of War’. You could even zoom so far in that you can follow a single unit as if you are on the ground with it, seeing a rather surprising amount of unit detail for how close you can get. Yet this all takes place fluidly with the zoom and only causes a pop of texture when you reach a certain ‘altitude’, but the results are a meticulous level of detail that could only be achieved from visiting the area, Google maps and historical photographs.
At first you could accuse Achtung Panzer of being ‘short’, with just five overall campaigns on the surface. But these contain around ten or so battles in each campaign. Along with each individual battle which can last up to an hour, you will be getting fifty hours or more out of the experience and secretly getting a history and geography lesson on top of it.
You’ll find this is definitely aimed toward the purest with a tutorial absent and a difficulty curve which takes a while to get up to pace with. Total War fans will probably love Actung Panzer, where as others might be susceptible to cursing its name. Achtung Panzer could very much be the Ninja Gaiden of the strategy sim.
Sadly while its initial unforgiving difficulty is up there, its execution is not. Simple things such as chasing the retreating enemy when the game enters into its real time mode, seems to progress across the terrain at a snail’s pace. If you intend to catch and kill the remaining dregs of an almost defeated enemy squad, you’d prefer to do it quickly using the fast forward option and then resume capturing the map. However this is not the case, as whenever you gain enough ground to open fire on your enemy, your unit will come to a full halt while the enemy continues on its attempt to escape. Sometimes you can be lucky with the enemy deciding it has run far enough and doubles back to get killed. On the other hand you could end up chasing them into a forested sector where you will be able to watch them navigate the woodland somewhat clumsily. But if you do decide to chase them, by the time you navigate the wood the war will have ended… twice.
While this AI issue is the games biggest fault, there is one point where you will fight in massive woodland. At various points you can go through it quite competently, other times the units will appear to be having a spasm, having a mental breakdown or others will just outright stop and refuse to move in any direction. This is in stark contrast to roads or villages where the units can glide around buildings and use the areas roads to perfection.
The final issue which I touched on is the default game speed. You are given these massive areas to simulate the battles in, yet while it is accurate for this purpose, it doesn’t make for good gameplay. While the fast forward options are great and you can watch and control them from an almost cinematic angle if you so should choose, getting there would be one hell of a chore if not for those most vital of buttons.
Achtung Panzer 1943 has some nice graphical touches with a great attention for detail. But for a game you almost certainly have to be a purist to enjoy this type of thing and it’s not something that could be recommended to a first time player of a battle sim. While it will most certainly gather a following among a particular circle of players, it will simply seem overly complicated for the more casual of gamers.
