Yet the strangely amusing name belies a very serious war-simulation that prides itself on historical accuracy in terms of just about everything it does. If attention to detail is what gets you up in the morning, Achtung Panzer will be the best alarm clock you've ever bought. Each soldier, tank, and artillery piece has a vast array of information regarding firepower, movement speed, armour penetration etc. The game even has a “unit viewer” which allows you to get up close and personal to every in-game model, so you can scrutinise just how realistic each unit's representation is.
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| Fences, the tank's natural prey. | Railway lines, the tank's natural predator. |
The historical accuracy is also present in the game in a broader sense. The game's six-step campaign takes you through a step-by-step recreation of the conflict around the Kharkov area (which occurred immediately after events at Stalingrad). Each step of the battle plays out like a miniature campaign of your preferred Total War game. Unit movement is played out on a two-dimensional map, with actual combat played out in three-dimensional real-time.
To be honest, it's unlikely you will spend a huge amount of time looking at the campaign map, it's in the battles where the meat of Achtung Panzer is really at. Confronting the enemy is an intense and thrilling experience. This is partially due to the incredible sound the combat map has. Standard rifles and machine guns sound like thunderclaps in the silence of the wintery Russian Steppe, and when you get your hands on some artillery, boy are you in for a treat. The visuals aren't half bad either, although it would be a stretch to call the game pretty. Gunfire lights up the night, with tracers streaking across the ground, and you can zoom right in to see exactly what each unit is doing.
This game isn't all about pretty lights and convincing explosions, it's quite the opposite. This is a war simulation, and so winning battles is all about tactics. Flanking the enemy, setting up ambushes, using cover and terrain to your advantage. One of my rifle squads managed to survive a barrage of fire from multiple armoured vehicles because they were crouched on a railway line atop a gradual slope, the combination of the metal rail and the angle of the incline protecting them from the majority of the enemy fire.
Ironically, it's in the simulation aspects of Achtung Panzer that problems begin to arise. Like the campaign map, the combat map is an accurate depiction of the area around Kharkov, which means there is a large amount of empty space on the map. This, combined with that old RTS staple fog of war and generally sluggish units means that just finding the enemy can be agonisingly slow. Each individual conflict can last a good couple of hours, most of which is spent moving your ponderous units around the map as you strive to find the enemy. There is an option to speed up the game, but even with this cranked right up there are still long periods where nothing actually happens. The fact that the enemy is hidden to you also contradicts the fact that the campaign map registers you as being in battle. Surely it would make more sense that you know the location of the enemy from the start.
This lack of knowledge regarding your opponent's location also renders the deploy stage at the start of each combat phase rather pointless. Before combat begins, you are given time to strategically place your units and for your soldiers to dig trenches. Yet because you are unaware of where the enemy is coming from, any deployment strategy is likely to be completely nullified, thus the most appropriate “tactic” is simply to clump your units together to maximise your firepower upon enemy contact.
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| The Russians' decision to have Bruce Willis as gunner paid off dividends. | For some reason he couldn't understand, Vladimir always ended up on carpool duty. |
Achtung Panzer's most significant problem is it isn't particularly newcomer friendly. The tutorial consists of pointing out what the various buttons on the toolbar do, which is handy in itself, until you realise that hovering over a button with the cursor also brings up information on that particular button, rendering the tutorial null and void. A tutorial that told you how to actually play the game would have been far more useful. This isn't to say the game is impossibly hard, just don't expect a gradual introduction to how things work. Achtung Panzer's preferred method of teaching is to shove you in a tank and roll you downhill towards enemy lines.
Top Game Moment:
ACHTUNG PANZER: KHARKOV 1943 VERDICT
There’s a lot of potential in Achtung Panzer. The ground combat is the most enjoyable I’ve encountered since Relic’s Company of Heroes, and playing tactically genuinely pays off. Yet these bouts of entertainment are marred by long periods of trundling tedium, and novices are likely to be baffled by the complex interface and the lack of direction in how the game is supposed to be played. That said, if you’ve got a bit of patience and are willing to forgive the games peculiarities, you might want to consider picking this up.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Encountering the enemy for the first time, it’s far more explosive than you expect.
