Panzer Tactics

Rating Teen Genre strategy Publisher Conspiracy Entertainment External Links Official Conspiracy Entertainment Website

When I was told I was to review Panzer Tactics DS, I thought about playing a cute RTS involving tanks, as the word “Panzer” is German for “tank”. Much to my confusion I received an old school hexagonal military strategy game based on World War II. “Hexagonal” should probably explain this entire game. If any reader is familiar with war games that use the format, then they are, no doubt, familiar with their complexities.

Panzer Tactics DS puts the three largest armies of World War II and chronicles their patterns. Picture if you will, the Germans taking Poland and journeying to Stalingrad, The Russians taking back their homeland from the Germans and the Allies taking back Europe…from the Germans. If the irony of this played out theme in a videogames is lost to you continue reading.

Armies are armies and while you don’t have amazing space age technology or magic what you command is standard thoroughfare for the time: infantry, tanks, anti-tank, anti-air, bombers, fighters and boats. You take your turn, computer/player takes theirs. Digging deeper brings out some great things from what looks like, on the surface, a cookie cutter turn based strategy game.

Your army consists of core and auxiliary units. Core units will always be with the player throughout every mission and they gain experience and special abilities as the game progresses. More core units can be purchased during a mission using fame points and can subsequently be deployed in the same turn. Missions contain main and secondary objectives. While secondary objectives are optional, they reward the player in useful ways, such as extra fame points, reducing the cost of units for the next mission, etc. With ten well laid out missions for each campaign, the single player is a rich experience of ambushing enemies, conducting assassinations and outright brutal warfare.

Interface is clean and you can quickly access all information about player and enemy units with a map that clearly marks all objectives. The problem is that the game is probably too much “strategy.” The ten tutorial missions are helpful with getting started, but do little to reduce the overwhelming amount of pictures and numbers that all correlate to your units’ effectiveness based on paper, rock, scissors and what terrain you are doing paper, rock, and scissors on. Simply put, this game is not for the beginner in turn based strategy.

Multiplayer modes feel awkward. Hot Seat mode is played with one cartridge whereby you and a friend take turns with one DS. I see many trust issues with this strategy. It is also well known that many other games offer play with one cart, setting a default character (or in this case, default army) for the other DS owner. Other options will involve getting friends together unless you can find other people out there who like turn based strategy games. If you manage to get some players get ready for long games as turn based is not fast or for the impatient.

If you are the die-hard World War II player, the single player will captivate you, and maybe multiplayer will tickle your fancies, assuming that you can get some non-Hot Seat action going.