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Panzer General 3: Scorched Earth

Panzer General 3: Scorched Earth

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Addictive stuff
Review: Panzer General III is a further refinement of Panzer General II with excellent 3D graphics. This Scorched Earth package concentrates on the Russian Front.

The game play is similar to that of Panzer General II and with the option of playing set senarios or campaigns or generate your own battle. Settings can be altered to suit your own abilities or preferences to make the game more easy to handle or to make more challenging. Presitage points are no longer used to obtain new units, instead allotted slots are avaiable to build up your army.

Panzer General III is basically a progression of previous Panzer General games and are very enjoyable and addictive to play.

One thing that would be nice to see if it could be done is to have a campaign generater.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good old PG....but beautiful!
Review: PG III: Scorched Earth is the latest addition in a long series of turnbased strategy games. I have found the other games in this series very addictive and I find they strike a fine balance between depth and almost instant playability. That is to say, these games are not for hardcore wargamers but for people who love tanks and boardgames but don't want to micromanage too much. Compared to Peoples General and Panzer general II, this game has outstanding graphics. It is really nice to see your Tiger tank race down a road, beautifully rendered, to meet its adversary. The sound effects match very well, adding to the immersive effect without standing very much out. This also means at least I haven't found them to be annoying.

On the army management side PG III has expanded the leader side, actually putting faces on them and giving you a leader roster to choose from to command your new units. The units themselves don't gain experience but the leader does and as he becomes promoted his unit can perform more actions per turn. This is really powerful and lends more flexibility to your units. Your fighter plane can move twice, for instance looking for an enemy bomber, shoot and move again.

The missions are more varied than the ones previously encountered in this series. You will be required to fight breakout battles, search and destroy missions, as well as the good old take certain objectives. Having only just bought the game I won't comment on the campaign design but it is in general a pretty simple game to learn and I feel that it adds plenty of new sides to satisfy veteran players of the series.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Different taste of PG
Review: Pnzer General series are the best wargames for years. Every PG is better than the previous one. PG2 was fantastic and still it is. But I don't know I am playing PG3 for months and still I couldn't find the taste of PG2. Graphics, animations and sound is very good, they are 3D. The battles are from eastern front. But I didn't like the slot thing. I would like to see good old prestige points instead of slots. In PG3 we can't build a large army as we did in PG2. Only 10-12 units including 2 bomber and 1 fighter is not enough. Of course your enemy has the same number of units. It doesn't give me the taste of PG2's huge battlefields. We can't have numbers of same unit. Like we can only have 1 king tiger or 2 panther in a scenario. I used to have tens of tanks and artillery in PG2 and in PG3 it is like small tactical combats and also the maps are smaller than PG2. Of course game has many good points. As I said 3D graphics and animations are really good. Watching our tanks rolling down the hills or our bombers diving for attack is well done. And it is harder than the previous PG's. This time we can move our units more than once and we can attack to enemy units more than once in one turn. I remember in one turn I opened fire for six times with my Panther. We can move our artillery and infantry with trucks, disembark them, attack, and embark again and move in one turn. There are 3 different scenario types, the classic one capture enemy cities, second one get your units out of map which you are trying to move your units out from the map from designated places and the third one is the search and destroy missions which we are trying to destroy some specific enemy units. Those are the good stuff. I liked it but not as much as PG2. But if you are a Panzer General fan like me, you'll play it till you like it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: No hot seat multiplayer!!!
Review: The game has great graphics and sound, but too many bugs that can't be corrected by patches. And no hot seat multiplayer, it REALLY needs that option. Another thing that bugs me (ha ha) is that in the battle maker you can't change the placement of victory locations also it can be disappointing to not be able to play your 3 player game except on the internet. Still PGIII is a big improvement over Panzer General 2 in that in PGII the only way to win is to take over all the victory locations or destroy all the enemy's units. In PGIII there are 4 ways to win, which really adds to the flavor of the game.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not worth the price!
Review: The game is full of strategy which is fun. The game is geared toward experienced players. This is not a game for kids younger than 15-16yrs. due to the complicated aspects of the game. I found glitches in the C.D. which frustrates the player.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: More of The Same But It Was Good To Begin With
Review: The new PG adds very little to the previous version, other than changing the interface. At the same time I have always enjoyed PG so I value this new edition mostly for the new scenarios and campaigns. For me a campaign pack would have done the same job. As a gamer who sticks to the same old games over the years I was glad to see this one. For someone familiar with the previous version and looking for variety this will be a disappointment.

For someone new to PG this will be as good a start as any of the other versions. The game generally takes a while to figure out and can be quite frustrating at first as your army tends to get beaten up all the time. As you gain experience with the game you will find it more and more enjoyable not just as tactical combat but I think you can also appreciate the oveeral campaign strategy of building an army of experienced and complimentary units.

Among the few new things the most important is probably removing the prestige as the "currency" of the game and making acquisition of new units conditional on their availability. As a result you no longer end up with a clearly overpowering force in the later stages of the campaigns as usually happened with PG II.

The other important change is that units do not get experience through battles but instead rely on promotions for the commander assigned. This really put an end to the common strategy of having units fight tough battles in the beginning just to upgrade their experience.

Overall, the game is like a picture from an old vacation - you like to look at it for the memory but it doesn't generate any new excitement.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Game for PG Fans
Review: This game is a fine sequel to the PG series. I've played all of the PG games since the original release, and this one does not disappoint. SSI made improvements in each PG release; however, they also deleted some cool features from previous releases (i.e.: level bombing using HE-111s or B-17s in PG1). SSI eliminated the "prestige-points as currency to purchase equipment" system in PG III, and that takes a bit getting used to. PG III is a continuation of PG 3D Assault, so campaigns take place in the Eastern Front, thus no "Overlord" (D-Day) or the "Autumn Mist" (Battle of the Bulge). To play battles in the Western Front as the British and Americans, I got PG 3D Assault. The 3-D graphics in PG III is great (complete with rain drops and snow flakes), but your game pieces do some times blend in with the surroundings, which can cause you to leave units behind if you're not careful. PG III is more challenging than previous releases, and the AI does a much better job in flanking maneuvers. You can no longer build an unrealistically huge army to overwhelm the opponent during campaign play, and you better watch you flanks in this game. PG III also added the "leader" feature, which other reviewers have already mentioned. When playing the Germans, PG III gives you some historic sense of the strategic challenges that the Wehrmacht faced in WW II of trying to occupy a huge country such as Russia with a relatively small force. When playing the Germans, securing your flank while continuing to drive forward requires player to study the strategic map carefully. Even with equipment superiority, invading a country like Russia is a strategic nightmare, as the French found out in 1812 and the Germans again during the Second World War. Overall, a great game, and deserves five stars even though SSI should offer a price break for owners of PG 3D Assault.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: jah volt herr general!
Review: This was my first PG video game, but about my eigth that I have been searching for to quell my desire to be a general and use my brains to do something similar to what they did in WW2. PG does that! I find it fairly accurate and a lot of fun. What could have been done to make it more challenging, fun and realistic would be to take into account supply and logistics. Guderion, nor Karhkov, could just click a mouse and wait a turn to be completely refitted! Maybe the next PG, PG4, they will! docv


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