Scenarios offer a set of objectives that must be accomplished within a deadline and the units, prestige, and experience carry over from one to the next.
Those who’ve played Panzer Corps will find the campaign setup quite familiar. With five campaigns and plenty of scenarios, you’ll find yourself in a variety of climates. The last thing you want to do is fight in the woods and mountains if you’ve focused the majority of your energy on improving your armored divisions. Instead it simply offers an overview of the challenges that you may face with each approach and what you’ll need to prepare for, an important choice if you’ve specialized your forces in a certain direction. Although an earlier build had direct mechanical benefits for choices (Poland offered prototypes for the north and increased prestige for the south), it seems this was scrapped and your choice no longer offers such benefits. Poland, for example, has a northern and southern approach that you can take which will give you two separate experiences with different scenarios and challenges to overcome. There are several campaigns available and they frequently offer choices that can alter the path that they take. It’s quite an accomplishment to develop a game that is so well designed that the majority of its flaws go under the radar until they’re later revealed by its own sequel’s improvements, but Flashback Games did just that. Seemingly everything was improved at least a little and I found myself instantly hooked. Yet I was pleasantly surprised (maybe even ecstatic) when I began my invasion of Poland in Panzer Corps 2. Needless to say, I wasn’t sure how it could be improved upon enough to warrant a sequel and was skeptical that there would be enough that was new to make its price tag worth it. With a robust selection of units complete with a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses, determining the right tool for the job is a must to ensure that you don’t run out of resources and doom your campaign. Scenarios are tense throughout, resources and time are limited, and although your forces are always improving, so too are your enemies’. Now that we have a modding community, I would love to see an offering that fades back the tactics and movement overlay so that it doesn't obscure the lovely models and 3-D terrain but retains the value the overlay adds.As far as tactical wargaming goes, I struggle to think of a title that did a better job of representing it than Panzer Corps.
It is way too bright and garish and puts many people right off before they even get their heads around the game.
Gamers looking for a straight forward RTS are gonna curse it, War Gamers, may well like it, as I do.įor me however the biggest drawback of the SM Series is the tactical and movement overlay. This is both its blessing and the curse of SM, depending on what you are looking for. that attempts to deliver a fun gaming experience but also attempts to represent the strategic and tactical challenges of the specific scenario. I've played no other wargame outside of the classic hardcore games from Grigsby, Koger and co. The '+' for Strategic Mind is its level of detail. It is not, like PC2 and others, a Strategic Theatre sim and doesn't pretend to be. I'm not saying SM games doesn't have this, It does to an extent, it is the other game that best represents the theatre scale required for battle representations. The scale is uncommon in that it is between Strategic and Tactical, but they vary it well to represents the major historic battles it attempts to illustrate in terms of challenge and tactics. The '+' of Panzer Corps 2 for me is the new Axis missions expansions.