There are detailed military formations and vehicles for obscure fighting forces such as the Dutch army in World War II, and campaign modes that allow you to nurture a unit through a series of engagements, gradually upgrading them as new equipment becomes available. Steel Panthers’ kitchen-sink game design means you’ll find everything you could want - amphibious landing and river crossing missions, deadly mine fields only engineers can safely remove and hair-raising night battles where you can only see the enemy when they’re next to you.
However, even missed shots increase a unit’s suppression, progressively limiting its ability to move or shoot back, until it starts fleeing the battlefield. Infantry running across open ground are quickly mowed down by machine guns - but once they’ve found cover in forests or buildings, they can withstand a hail of bullets and require heavy artillery to dig out.
If your weapons can’t penetrate the armor they have no effect, and you’re forced to flank the enemy to hit the weaker rear armor or lure them into a trap. The damage modeling is pretty realistic - unlike a video-game boss, the eponymous Panther tank can’t be worn down by a dozen hits from a weaker Sherman. ‘Steel Panthers: World War II.’ Shrapnel Games art So then you start pre-planning an artillery bombardment or even a smoke barrage - but it takes several turns for the artillery to begin the fire mission, and the bombardment may be inaccurate if you don’t have a good spotter in place. So the next time, you send infantry alongside the tanks to spot the enemy ambushes - but they end up getting chewed up by entrenched machine guns.
The game doesn’t require you to understand every tactic and weapon system - you learn through your failures and occasional successes.įor example, it’s easy to charge your awesome Tiger tanks ahead on a map, confident in their superior armor and firepower - only to discover that tanks are really bad at spotting infantry hiding in ambush in the woods, ready to set your invulnerable tank on fire with a Molotov cocktail down the driver’s hatch. Steel Panthers does an excellent job of teaching combined arms - the hard and fun way. Smoke, flames, and shell craters quickly deform the landscape and heavy artillery punches holes in buildings, eventually causing them to collapse. The graphics are hardly award-winning, but compared to the flavorless tactical symbols of other realistic war games, they do a great job of conveying a diversity of equipment, while the top down topographical maps depict a variety of environments and conditions - whether the sandy berms of Iraq, the ruined street blocks of Stalingrad or the frozen woods of the Ardennes in the Battle of the Bulge. The sequel, Modern Battles, features new equipment such as attack helicopters and wire-guided anti-tank missiles and virtually every conflict after 1945 - Korea, Vietnam, Arab-Israeli, Iran-Iraq, Angola, Desert Storm and many, many more.įinally, Steel Panthers 3: Brigade Command spans both eras and changes the scale of the game to commanding platoons instead of squads, with hexes equivalent to 250 meters instead of 50. The first Steel Panthers game deals with World War II, and in addition to dozens of stand-alone scenarios, allows you to play a campaign lasting the entire conflict commanding a company-size force for any of the warring nations.
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