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Amazing RTS game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you like WWII based RTS games, this one is a must have. I got to play the german version of this game and it is truly amazing.

The singleplayer mode is great (5 stars). Graphics are simply the best I have seen in this genre. All units are so detailed, the environment is beautiful etc. plus great sound effects.

The missions are really diverse and challenging and often times when you think you're through something new comes up. I liked the missions way better than in C&C Generals.

Multiplayer is still somewhat buggy but the next patch is going to take care of that (at least so they said!). By the way, the first patch came out on July 16th, one month after the german release date (see www.cdv.de) and most of the issues (at least in singleplayer mode) were adressed, so really no need to bitch around, I think!

Overall: Get this game if you like RTS games. You won't regret it!

Codename: Panzers - State of the Art RTS!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played the Panzers Multiplayer demo yesterday for the first time and was really suprised... the community is really huge. I think it's already released in Germany and France. I've played with some guys from France, Germany and Switzerland.

The game features stunning graphics and outstanding vehicle behaviour.

Every player is able to choose his own army out of many different units at mission start. You have to decide which units will help you best to destroy your opponents. That's the first thrilling part, after that you have to fight with great air support against up to 4 players (8 in the full version!).

And it's really much fun!

I expect the full version will be as good as the MP demo. I've heard it will be released soon in the US... hope there will be no delay.

PS: There is no mouse problem anymore.

Best Realistic War RTS ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played a lot of war games on my PC, but not a lot of great military RTS games. Sure the Close Combat games were fun, and pretty darn realistic, but this game is a blast to play. Some of the RTS games I play are pretty darn complicated, and I need to learn a ton of hotkeys, but this one makes things pretty simple. I also hate games that make me gather resources in order to fight battles and make units. This is WAR...I'm not interested in "factory simulator" or "supply line simulator." I just want to fight!

The graphics are great, and the special effects are pretty cool too. I'm getting better at the game as I play it more, and I can't wait to get further in the campgaigns. I'd heartily recommend this game to any strategy fan of military games. Thumbs up!

Excellent Game, Worthy of my Computer (which is saying alot)

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game can hold its own against many RTS games out there now. It has a much stronger online community too when compared to quite a few big name titles(past/present)out there which dumped hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars into advertising.

Codename: Panzers reminded me of the Close Combat series, but in a 3d version that was not too cumbersome (as a few have tried to recreate the same feel for CC series in 3d format but with little success). It definately captures the fun the CC series had but with a much more graphic pleasing version. The Multiplay is absolutely thrilling.

From a guy who has been playing these types of games for years, its worth it.

Very Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Loved the game but I thought that the German Campain was short. The Allies Campain is hard and the Russians is also challenging. The only bad think is non realistic damage. In the Training Camp where you can control all units my king tiger tank hit a Russian truck but it didn't explode. Overall it is a fun game and would recomend it to anyone. Also the little movies during the missions are cool. Has good graphics and besides tanks and troops you can bomb building and divebomb tough to destroy tanks. Very Fun!!!

Rock solid Singeplayer, weak Multiplayer

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Overview - what it's all about

Codename Panzers is a real time strategy game that features the early phase of WW2. The campaigns deal about the invasion of eastern Europe by the Third Reich.

There are 3 different campaigns in the game: Germany, Russia and Allies. All of these reflect the actions from the individual points of view. This means if you play Germany and have to Blitzkrieg into Warszawa you may also play the opposition and have to prevent the Germans from achieving their goal.

Technical - Graphics, Sound & Music

The graphics and artworks of this game are outstanding. I've never seen such a beatiful animated infantry before.
The weapon sounds are quite cool, either. I play the game with a surround headset (Medusa 5.1), and am quite impressed how well the sounds are distinguishable coming from the different directions - depending on the angle you turned the free 3D moveable game area.
The music supports the athmosphere very well, too. All units give voice-feedback when you issue new orders and the voices are very well done.

Into the action - Singleplayer

The singleplayer game is clearly the main feature of this game. Also CDV, the publisher, promotes the multiplayer part very heavy, the singleplayer experience is the reason for me to give it 4 "Fun-Stars". It would have been 5 Stars if wayfinding routines of the troops were better. Sometimes troops just don't move the way you want, the way that was shortest. This can lead to situations where you have a large group of enemies spotted, want to roll them over with the tanks you got, and the tanks are arriving at the scene one by one and are slaughtered by enemy gunfire like lambs on a shambles. This accounts to MP, too, of course.

There are three different difficulty levels you can chose from. The difference is whether or not you get reinforcements after missions and whether or not they are already trained units or fresh meat.

At the beginning of (almost) each mission you can buy troops for prestige points you earned in previously mastered missions. Troops that earned experience in fights are brought into the next mission, too. These are quite vital, because they do more damage and stand enemy fire longer then untrained ones. The missions develop as you progress - new goals and situations are scripted in and intermittent cutscenes bring the story forward. Most of the missions are well-balanced, with one or two exemptions where it sometimes seems a bit unfair regarding what the enemy has and what you got against them.
All in all this makes up for a new class winner in WW2 RTS games. It makes fun to replay the missions, because there are eastereggs to find, surivive with more veteran units at each level end and additional and secret goals to master.

Units can be combined (move infantry into transports, link an artillery to a truck), you can capture enemy tanks by burning the crew out with flamethrowers and a lot of other nice things like ordering a group of units to follow a spearhead unit.

As call-in support you can order Stuka attacks, bombardements, artillery, recon planes and paratroopers.

Skirmish Mode

In this mode you can play against the computer artificial intelligence (AI). Well, there simply is none. The computer rushes with all of its troops to your starting point and lets the match end in about 5 minutes. No further comment on this here. I took this into account with the 3 Star Rating i give in the overall rating.

Well, theres Multiplayer, too...

I played the actual patched version (1.60) and was crestfallen in consideration of the great qualitative difference between SP and MP. A one-on-one match can be fun, but as soon as you want to play in teams you are out of luck. A 3-3 or 4-4 match simply crashes back to desktop all the time. What a pity for this great game.

In fact, the only multiplayer experience I really enjoy with this product is the coop mode, where you can play SP missions together with your pal. In that mode we divide the troops so one plays the tank squad and the other one artillery and infantry - most of the time such a match can be played to the end without a back to desktop or data mismatch. The ESL League banned the game for its open cheater holes (the .pak resource file can be altered client-side and has impact on MP sessions) until the game has a worked over multiplayer part.

Conclusion

If CDV works over the Multiplayer part, the AI and the wayfinding routines it would get my 97% rating as one of the best games I've ever played. Until then, I can only recommend it for its good SP experience and tell anyone to forget about MP as far as he wants to play it seriously.

so sad...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: August 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i wrote this email to the us Associate Producer, Codename: Panzers & English Language Community Manager on July the 29th, as i reccognized that he asked the english speaking community to make "good" reviews @amazon, (there is still no new fix):

"If everyone were to write their comments about this game @ amazon.com, I am convinced, that you will loose EVERY multiplayer related customer for this game. The multiplayer is really not good, still not fixed (you can still cheat, any more than six players the game crashes, no real artificial intelligence visible of the computer steered opponent etc...).

There doesn't seem any movement here at all, maybe you can help out and push your colleagues in Germany to remove all those annoying bugs during multi play.

The worst thing is: CDV stopped talking to the community, they don't answer questions and just say "we are fixing the problems", without saying which problems they recognized...to the community this just seems to be a case of `tell them we are working on it and then at least they will shut up'

If you buy a game, with that many errors and missing features and a then get a publisher who stopped talking to the community, you'd probably also feel cheated, like me and many other people in the German Multiplayer scene."

i wrote this mail, after the german support did not answer.
the answer from those producer was some "la la la", saying nothing with many words... but hey, it was an answer *g*

the game is now 2 month on the market in germany and the multiplayer bugs are still not fixed. also there is still no sign of an "AI", every reaction is just scripted ...

and CDV pretends in some german software magacines "that everything is fixed and working properly" ... LOL is the only thing you can say about that. read the german cdv-board.de for further informations...

very sad, the game looks really great, but it plays bad.

nothing more to say, sit, beta test for cdv and wait for the patch... if there will ever be one...

best 20 buck i ever spent!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: August 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Yeah it the best dame 20 buck i ever spent! It actually better than i thought. 2 time better looking than the picture on the box. It an excellent game but not perfect. Let talk about the cons of the game, but before i started i would like to thank this one person that said he wouldn'd review the game if it wasn't good and everyone else that gave this game a positive review. First of all the anti-tank doesn't shoot that far, i know it not realalistic but it could be farther. That other goes for tanks and other unit. The snipers infantry is an good example of a bad idea. i was playing this mission where you have to destroy the v-12 rocket base and my sniper were actually useless and here why, even the german submachiner could kill my snipers. In another word they don't shoot that far. Another another flaw in this game and as almost other game is the cutscene is that the cutscence is stripped so if i capture a german panzer six tiger, it wouldn't appear in the cutscene. In another word, "unreallalistic". And also the heroes talk with their mouth close. Another thing that could had be great is let say you have a 2 medic unit (total of 4 infantry each) and you tell them to get into a truck, guess what? Only one medic unit will enter while the other one is left behind even if there is enough room. Then as the truck leave, my left behind medic is instantly kill by the enemy snipers. Also i would have like more unit to control, 50 maybe? And where are the allied and german motorcycle? what happen and why didn't stormregion and cdv put in. O, and the last con i can remember is that the support is very weak. The artillery is not that strong, if only i can destroy a tiger tank with one artillery strike. The target area is too small. And what with the fighter bomber, it only destroy one target. I guess it make the game a little challenging. Just make it a little more realalistic. That all the cons i can remember for now, if i find any more, i will update it. The campaign is not that long compare to blitzkrieg, but the good thing is that the mission are quite hard even on normal mode. There are a lot of secondary and hidden objective which is very cool. The cutscene is short but is very well done. all the unit took amazing. I love how cdv and stormregion went all out and made a infantry unit look amazing. O, and another flaw is that you can zoom all in because the unit are nicely detail. Using special equipment is unique and fun to use. sirmisk mode is fun but very short. The senario is fun but be warn even if you play throught the whole campaign without any slow down, it still slowdown in the senario mode in which it is the d-day senario. Last but not lease, you can't go wrong with this title even if it was 40 bucks!

It's sucks

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 26
Date: October 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Totally agree with mark. After games like Soldiers: Herous of WWII, Blietzkrig - this game is totally unrealistic. Just another arcade. Forgive me for my bad english.

Only tried the Demo so-far, but...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: October 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If there was a lot missing from the Demo in terms of interface and ability, then that was a poor marketing decision by the developer - They always say First-impressions are EVERYTHING.

What I saw and tried to use was not at all as good as I expected. I've only played the Demo, however; The game has been out in Europe for a bit now, and they could have improved/updated the Demo if it didn't reflect the actual game's quality and functions.
Newcomers to the RTS WW2 game may find this title very enjoyable. It IS different from most RTS titles out there in both good and bad ways. But the only way to fully appreciate this fact is to play as many others as possible. There ARE RTS games I would consider better regardless of Codename: Panzers merits. Saying that, this game is an excellent "starter", though seasoned RTS fans may find the same flaws I did once the "Eyecandy-Wows!" wear off.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this game is "Phase One" meaning that it's sure to become a series like many others have. These games usually evolve and improve with each build. I have read some very reasonable criticisms of the first Blitzkrieg game and they seem to have listened and made dramatic improvements with the sequel, "Blitzkrieg - Burning Horizon", and the follow-up, "Blitzkrieg - Rolling Thunder" should follow this trend.

PROS:

- Lush 3D landscapes - They really put a lot of time and energy into this part.

- Better than average Sound, maybe better with high-end Sound Cards and Speakers. Sound FX seemed decent to say the least.

- Well done "Dead". The blood wasn't bright red but a more realistic crimson. And the corpses seemed more random than in other games which repeatedly use the same figure in the same "dead" pose.

- Adequate visual detail to vehicles. Adheres to the standards presented by other games. It may exceed them but it's hard to tell off hand.

- Figures seemed to move realistically, though the Prone shooting postion was incorrect (legs close together, not spread- out)

CONS:

- Limited array of voices for the characters and figures. This may be a limitation of the Demo, but still. First-impressions and all...

- Inconsistant uniform details (at least in game-play): If you're gonna' brag about it, follow-through all the way. The US characters would make any Re-enactor/Living History buff livid.

- Difficult to see and understand GUI. Seemed overly-simplistic and vague. Critical buttons/menus not well-placed if extant.

- Settings options limited - compares poorly to Blitzkrieg or Combat Mission.

- Minor anachronistic details, such as a Cross ball-point pen (1947 and not yet in a matte finish), etc.

BOTTOM LINE:

Not a complete waste of time or money. Entertaining for some, disappointing for others. Those on tight budgets who want a game to bite into may want to try the demos of this and other RTS games first.

This is just my own opinion and observations on this game like any review, mind you. And again, I have only played the Demo version so-far, thus my opinions and observations may be inaccurate.

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