After one-and-a-half hours of elevated struggle, I forged a slim column of Shermans into Owen420Canada’s home base to steal a victory. He had spent all of his action cards and spare units the round before, foolishly dropping a massive Tiger to the right of my last tank in a last ditch effort to save himself. He probably didn’t know that he couldn’t attack right after deploying the unit. After wasting the tank, he positioned a tiny squadron of Nazi riflemen on his most precious of tiles. He dug in, meaning he would be able to attack first when I began my assault, but I began the round rich in airstrikes and spare units to sacrifice for precious extra points right before the final dice roll. It was with relish that I ripped the German flag from the battlements.
You’re reading a review for Panzer General XBLA, an adaptation of a classic tabletop wargame, by somebody who was too young to have ever known the real thing. If you’re a wargame aficionado, you’ll likely blanch at my lack of understanding of the nuances of Panzer. I apologize for any factual or strategic errors present in this article, and I hope you’ll take the opportunity to expand my knowledge of the game and its legacy in the comments.
Panzer General (at least in its XBLA version) is a cerebral, turn-based mix between Magic: The Gathering and Advance Wars. Just as in the arcade version of Magic, called Duels of the Planeswalkers, that released earlier this year, you accrue cards through victories (online and off) with which to customize your six available decks. The game forces a hard cap on this customizability; maybe thirty cards out of sixty are up to you, the rest being a default stock that the game maintains so that you don’t specialize yourself out of being able to win.
There are artillery units, mechanized units, tanks, and infantry to choose from. Unlike in Advance Wars, air support isn’t a combat unit. Rather, it exists in the form of action cards that you can use at any time before or after combat proper. Action cards let you do things like heal your units, bombard enemies, add movements bonuses, and instantly gain or take away “dig-in” (defensive) status. Also, your artillery aren’t able to just bombard the enemy from far away without another unit engaging in direct combat first. You gain points to deploy units and use action cards based on the number of tiles of the map you control; there are special locations--such as towns, fortresses, and bridges--that add extra “prestige” points once possessed (which you do simply by moving over them).
Combat is quite complex. When attacking another unit, you always get to attack before their defense round... unless they’re dug-in, which reverses this order. Each unit has different strengths and weaknesses, and terrain can help or hinder you. Forests and fortresses provide extra defense, while rivers and hills increase and decrease your attack, respectively. Inside combat, the first round involves using a special kind of action card that is kind of like the “Instant” cards in Magic. This round continues until both parties decide to stop using the relevant cards in their hands (or run out of prestige), so it can get pretty hectic. After this round, players select one card (or none, if they wish) to sacrifice outright for a few extra points. Then the attacker rolls a dice, which can grant anywhere between -2 and +3 to their total score.
It’s actually ridiculously hard to kill enemy units sometimes, especially if they’re dug-in and thus rolling their attack first. Both types of decks, Nazi and Allied, have one mega-tank that requires a lot of skill and patience to take down (mostly because they have a base defense of 10, which is huge). Adjacent units and faraway artillery lend attack support, but these can be cancelled out using action cards. There are also sneaky moves like “Crack Shot” that instantly damage the enemy during the first round, meaning you can build a custom deck just for the purposes of wearing down a defending enemy with airstrikes and then killing them outright in the first round (before they get a chance to defend against you). If your assault goes awry, or if you mount a poor defense and manage to still live, you might be forced into a retreat that can damage you if your backside is blocked.
Panzer General XBLA is superior to Advance Wars, in my mind, in that the Magic elements make it more like, well, an actual historical battle. Go read a breakdown of a famous bloodbath like Pickett’s Charge. Now, did it sound like anything you’ve ever experienced in a turn-based strategy game? Probably not, because most games necessarily leave out the fluke decisions and tactical ingenuity of field commanders. The first two rounds of each assault in Panzer, where the action cards and sacrifices take place, simulate this complexity of actual battle in a way that a standard turn-based wargame can’t. Playing Panzer gives people who’ve never played tabletop wargames a chance to see why people would play a game like this over the course of three days: the sheer configurability of it all.
All of this probably sounds pretty arcane, but it makes sense once you’ve played one or two rounds of the singleplayer campaign. The moment-by-moment tutorials explain everything you need to know except advanced strategy. Each campaign mission is based upon a famous WWII battle; particularly onerous operations, such as Market Garden, are suitably brutal here. There are a number of ways to win any given match: capture the enemy HQ (which is difficult, because it can spawn a powerful unit for free every round), possess three consecutive tiles on the enemy’s “home line” (their side of the board), or destroy all of their units.
The enemy AI is passable, but you’re not going to get a perfect experience here until you’ve taken the fight online. Miraculously, you’ll find that random players on XBL stick with a match even when they’re losing after a long hour of struggle. In the singleplayer game, you can typically just break through the enemy’s main line with one or two units to steal their home tiles; online, your opponent will probably, within a round, completely surround your advance with newly-spawned units and wipe you out. The matches I’ve played online have all lasted nearly two hours, and they almost always end with both generals forging a tiny corridor of heavy tanks into the opposing HQ.
I’d liken this to the end of all great poker matches: from a pool of six, two players have mixed patience and bluffing strategy to eliminate weaker players and face each other in mortal combat... then they repeatedly go all in and rely on the flop or a lucky card on the river to see who takes first and second. Strategy is important here, but lucky dice rolls and card-draws often swing the final decision one way or the other. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up if you’ve been looking for a slightly more brainy competitive online game. It runs for 800 Microsoft points, and it’s now one of my favorite XBLA titles out of the maybe forty that I own.
The Good: Tactical complexity, deck customizability, solid online and offline play.
The Bad: Once you learn everything from the tutorials, you may find the transition between rounds a bit sluggish.
The Ugly: Not knowing what it was like to play this on a tabletop.
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Playthrough: Completed 9 of 10 solo missions on Normal, three on hard; played three online Player Matches (with two victories).
Disclosure: A retail download of Panzer General XBLA was provided for review by Ubisoft.
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