Atari Preview Day: Codename Panzers: Cold War

The game starts off with a Russian pilot screwing around in German airspace. At the same time, a UN plane flying through has a little engine problem and one of the engines catches on fire, creating a thick black smoke trail. The Russian plane gets caught up in the smoke and collides with the UN plane. Both planes then crash and that’s all that was needed for the Cold War to turn into a, um, Warm War.

We’re then taken to a US base in Germany where the UN has plane crash-landed. The Russians immediately start their invasion and Russian troops are being helicoptered into your base. Your first goal is to rally your troops scattered around the base and launch a counterattack against the invading forces.

The first thing I noticed was that the graphics were fantastic for an RTS game. The last RTS game I invested heavily in was StarCraft, and after finally kicking that habit, I stayed away from RTS games. So you can’t blame me for being very impressed with the graphics of the game as I’ve been trying to stay away from the genre. Everything was richly detailed and you can zoom in close enough to see the faces of your troops.

After defeating some of the Russian troops, my force of 25-plus soldiers stormed out of the base and onto the streets of Germany. Right outside of the army base, I had my troops set up a hospital just to check out how the building system works. The hospital was set up almost instantly and can be taken down even more quickly. There will be over 20 buildings that can be set up, including towers and bunkers.

My squad of grunts, medics and rocket launcher guys then made a run for the enemy, but why run when you can drive? You’ll be able to commandeer any car on the street and use it to transport your men. I ditched the cars once we got close to the enemy's position and used walls and trees as cover for my troops. I then moved some of my troops into a building to get around enemy fire. Your enemies won’t be able to hurt your troops if they’re using cover, but cover can be blown up. And just like you, your enemies can use cover as well. 

After dealing with these Russians, we came across a crane with an enemy sniper perched at the very top. Snipers are a complete bitch and will take out your troops easily. You can try to snipe back, but since I had some guys with rocket launchers, I just used them to blow the crane up, which was pretty satisfying.

After taking out the sniper on the crane, I was shown a mission later on that gave me control over a battalion of tanks. All of the tanks are customizable by the player, and there were quite a few different tanks here such as an anti-aircraft tank, radar tank, and flamethrower tank.

Overall, the game looked great. The environments looked fantastic and I was impressed by how good the enemy AI was. The game will have 18 missions with three difficulty options, 25 multiplayer missions, eight-player versus mode, and the game should clock in over 15 hours on Easy.

Codename Panzers: Cold War is developed by InnoGlow/StormRegion and published by Atari for the PC. It will be out around March 2009.