Codename: Panzers - Cold War for PC Reviews by Gamers

With the recent release of Relic's Dawn of War 2 and Creative Assembly's Empire: Total War, it's a good time to be a strategy gamer. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a great time to be a competing strategy game. Such is the case with Atari's Codename Panzers: Cold War, an enjoyable yet unexceptional entry in StormRegion's long-running series. There's still plenty of fun to be had here, for sure, but there simply aren't enough surprises and improvements for gamers who played the other games in the series.

Codename Panzers: Cold War picks up during the aftermath of World War 2. Tensions are high in occupied Germany between the NATO forces in the West and the Soviets in the East. After an accidental mid-air collision between a Russian MIG and an Allied cargo plane, the player is thrust into an all-out war between the two superpowers. Over the course of 18 missions, the player will lead small groups of infantry and armor in a variety of locations throughout Eastern Europe.

The missions follow the pattern of the earlier Codename Panzers games. The player takes part in local battles across a range of environments, from snowy mountain passes to fortified islands to crowded dockyards. Mission objectives are generally clear and direct and focus on capturing and occasionally defending key locations. The best of the missions switch back and forth between attack and defense, giving the player a chance to assault an objective, and then immediately turning around to fend off a vicious counter-attack. A wide range of optional and even secret objectives give players lots of smaller goals to achieve along the way.

Unfortunately, there seems to be less variety here among some of the main mission goals than in previous Codename Panzers games. Sure, there are the odd escort or infiltration missions, but the real focus here is on capturing points of interest. It's been a while since I played the previous games in the series, but I remember that many of their missions made the player feel like part of a larger battle. With one thrilling exception, none of the missions here have you fighting alongside any substantial friendly forces.

I got a little over two-thirds of the way through the campaign before the crash bugs convinced me to give up entirely. Normally, I'd have slogged my way through, saving the game every few minutes so as not to lose too much time. But when the game actually started eating my saves with every crash to the desktop, I decided to call it a day. I understand that the missions towards the end offer a handful of surprises but the prospect of replaying large parts of some of the missions over and over again was too discouraging. These crash bugs are likely to be fixed in the future but that's not going to help anyone who wants to play the game in its first week of release.

As in previous games of the series, there are options for cooperative multiplayer play in a handful of scripted missions, but no options to play through the entire campaign with a friend. The front end of the service is attractive enough, but what we really want is to go through the entire game with a friend backing us up.

In contrast to the Sudden Strike series of games, Codename Panzers has always focused on quality over quantity when it comes to your units and it seems like the selection is even more narrow this time around. In Cold War, players will have find themselves leading a dozen or so units from the NATO armories, from light tanks like the Bulldog all the way up to the massive M-103s. You can pay to add a handful of interesting upgrades to many of the vehicles as well, giving your Pattons an anti-air gun or outfitting your APCs with field repair kits and amphibious modifications. These upgrades make it a bit easier to tailor the small unit rosters to your liking, so you can have a few Bulldogs with anti-infantry flamethrowers and a few with regular cannons.

A wide range of combat infantry, including mine-laying engineers, hole-digging rangers and signal-jamming commandos help enlarge the player's tactical options in several interesting ways. When selecting your troops before a battle, or ordering them as reinforcements in the midst of the action, you can even equip them with special weapons, so you can boost the effectiveness of each unit with the addition of flamethrowers, bazookas or mortars. Your infantry units can even create unique structures to make impromptu guard towers, repair yards or hospitals just behind your front lines.



These special abilities are what make or break your tactics, so you'll need to stay on top of them. Fortunately, the number of units you control is never so great that you can't give them the attention they need. Better still, the unit icons in the interface clearly indicate which of your squads are armed with bazookas and which of your tanks have radar systems and reinforced tracks.

The interface also clearly shows each unit's promotion level. As your units take part in battles, they'll gain experience, which gives them more hit points and stronger attacks. You'll want to preserve these units and make them part of the core army that you carry with you from mission to mission. In between each mission, you'll enter a sort of marketplace where you can select the force you want to lead into the next battle from among the veterans you've preserved and from among a new pool of units purchased directly from the armory.

There are costs and size limits here, so you'll need to consider whether or not a single Long Tom artillery piece is worth as much to you as three squads of machine gunners. Unlike the previous games in the series, Cold War actually gives you enough information in the mission briefing that you can make some intelligent decisions about the composition of your force before you go in.

You'll buy these units and upgrades using prestige points earned during the battles. For the most part, these points accumulate through combat and ownership of victory flags, so the better you're doing, the more resources you'll have to work with in the future. But if you just go for the victory flags on the map, you'll be missing out on all the other important points of interest you can capture. Some, like repair depots and aid stations, can heal nearby units, while others, like the factories and barracks, let you spend prestige points to buy new units during the battle. Other special locations give you access to different kinds of reinforcements. A number of points of interest enable you to use special powers that can increase your overall effectiveness in combat.

Combat is enjoyable, both in terms of your overall tactical satisfaction and visual presentation. It's true that the AI doesn't present a particularly tough challenge -- RTS veterans are advised to skip past the "normal" difficulty altogether -- but watching the units succeed according to the type of force you've built and the way you've equipped them is rewarding. The AI, unfortunately, doesn't place a high enough priority on taking out your repair trucks or medics first, and is far too passive when under howitzer fire. As long as you load up with healers and keep your Long Toms out of visual range, there aren't many encounters you won't be able to handle.

On the other hand, maps that have lots of capture points seem to bring out a sneakier, more mobile side of the AI. If you're not careful about the angles of your advance and if you don't guard key locations in your rear, you may find small enemy forces stealing objectives behind your back. They're not quite as aggressive as they should be, but I've lost a couple of missions because I didn't give them enough credit for being able to get behind my forces and recapture undefended objectives.

Codename Panzers: Cold War uses the latest version of StormRegion's Gepard engine, and it does a phenomenal job. The level of detail and the overall density of the levels is very impressive. We expect to see plenty of little sandbags and barrels in these games, but there are literally dozens of tiny touches on every single screen of this game that really enhance the whole sense of reality. The same is true of the animations of the units, but unfortunately, the camera view that's best for playing the game isn't close enough to give you a sense of the life in the models.

The effects are much better this time around, proving that developers can do just as much with DirectX9 than can be achieved with the less familiar world of DirectX10. The effects from the flame throwers are particularly good, but there's a wide range of beautiful effects in this game. Where the explosions in the previous games in the series always looked a little artificial, here they really seem to come to life. The only problem is that the effects tend to cut the framerate down quite a bit, especially in the larger battles.

Gepard also incorporates a robust physics system that adds to the overall chaos of battle. Watching as buildings crumble under the pressure of cannon fire really makes this game feel like watching a war. It's a bit disappointing that there are no game effects associated with this, but we can understand that a system where collapsing buildings damaged your units might be asking for too much. On the plus side, some of the physics effects are put to great use in a few key sequences. I particularly remember the massive crane toppling over and crushing an entire row of houses, and the runaway train smashing through a line of enemy tanks. It's really too bad that the designers didn't include more stuff like this, because it really made the game much more exciting.

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