Review by: William Abner

I’m going into this review with a nagging feeling tugging at my shirt sleeve. I know full well that I am terribly biased when it comes to SSI’s 1994 PC smash Panzer General. It was a seminal game for me; I was in my early 20s and my wargaming was mostly limited to board games from Avalon Hill. Panzer General, while clearly an abstract strategy game, and one that was dismissed by hardcore grognard wargamers who demand more authenticity in their simulations, dug its claws in deep and I was hooked on its puzzle-like gameplay wrapped inside the confines of World War II.

So when Panzer Corps was announced I was excited and also leery – I’m normally not one for remakes, and while Tim van der Moer, CEO of The Lordz Games Studio was adamant that Panzer Corps was not a remake or a redesign, it was difficult not to look at the game and think “this is Panzer General all over again.” I was genuinely curious to find out how I would react to a game that took what Panzer General did right down to the core design and tweak it for a modern audience.

Turns out, The Lordz Games Studio did a marvelous job with Panzer Corps, and whether or not you want to call this a redesign, a reimaging, or a totally new game (this would indeed be a stretch) Panzer Corps offered exactly what a wanted – a game that played almost exactly like the old 1994 warhorse but with several key improvements that made the experience worthwhile, even after all of these years. Panzer General was the game that got me interested in PC wargaming, despite its loose relationship with reality, and hopefully Panzer Corps can do that for some of today’s younger gamers.

Panzer Corps thrusts you in the role of a general in the German Wehrmacht (the German armed forces). You start off the grand campaign attacking Poland and roll through the major and minor battles of the war from the Blitzkrieg into France to Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union) and detours into Greece and Italy. The campaign branches at times, giving you options on where to take your core army. All of this will be terribly familiar to anyone who played PG even though the campaign structure has changed quite a bit and the balance of the missions is greatly improved (Norway is no longer sadistic, and Barbarossa is no longer a breeze).

You have a lot of freedom in how you build your core army and these units stay with you, as long as they survive, from battle to battle. You earn prestige (the game’s currency) by capturing cities and performing well during the campaign which can be spent on upgrading your units (turning a little panzer into a bigger, badder panzer), adding strength to experienced units and buying new units, sometimes during a mission to bolster up defenses or to add to your attack strength. How you construct your core is really up to you as you have many German toys to play with from several types of infantry, tanks, recon, artillery, air power, and so on.

Your core army earns experience as they battle the enemy and you will undoubtedly grow attached to these units as they improve their rank. A new twist in Panzer Corps is the addition of medals as well as heroes. If a unit performs particularly well they may earn a hero attachment, which might boost their defense, spotting, attacking, or whatever. It makes these units even more special than your normal experienced unit.