Review:
Achtung Panzer!

Paradox Interactive is well known for it's line of real time strategy games, including titles such as Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Each of the games the studio has produced has offered historical accuracy, a steep learning curve, and highly detailed game play models. Achtung Panzer! does nothing new in terms of this, and is probably better off as a result – the creators have found a formula that works, and so they let it be.

The game is set during the Third Battle of Kharkov, a series of operations along the Eastern Front during WW2 by the German Army Group South against the Red Army. The player controls the German and the Soviet forces depending on the scenario (called Operations in the game), controlling units on a tactical map in a similar manner to Risk (forces move a certain number of territories on the map depending on their speed, the more territories captured the more reinforcements you can request) until they come into contact with the enemy, at which point the game switches to a more traditional RTS battlefield influenced by the location of the engagement. The faithfulness of the maps is stunning, but then again Paradox Interactive is well known for its attention to such details – the vehicles and soldiers are well rendered by the game engine, especially considering the difference between zoom views. The detail in the combat is also quite impressive, with vehicles being immobilized or destroyed outright or even just shrugging off certain attacks.

                                                                                           The difference in scale