Half Done & Incomplete Lesser Quality than A Combat Mission

User Rating: 6.5 | Panzer Command: Kharkov PC
I find the game quite half done and incomplete. Let's take a good look at it. First it comes with the IE 7.0 requirement issue to be able to use the entire product "without glitches". They rushed to make some sort of halfassed fix to allow it to work with IE 6.0, but, this comes with glitches and bugs without any hope of fixing it so the editors work at all. Then it doesn't come with any kind of step loss animations, if a unit takes a step loss you would never know it by looking at it because if it's a 3 man stand it will remain a 3 man stand until completely destroyed. Not even realistic looking. If it's a 5 man stand same thing either they all stand up or they all fall down at the same time. Then there is that pathing issue still in the game from PC:OWS where units get stuck on each other and it takes several phases to get them unstuck and half or all of them get eliminated in the process of this unfixed bug from the previous game. Roads come to a complete stop and no billboard continuation that give the maps that board gamey look instead of realistic looking. Then there are no melee animations or close assault animations when attacking an armored piece. If you don't realize you are within 25m of the assault vehicle you wouldn't know one was happening at all. Then there is no truck movement allowed of ground artillery at all, no anti-tank gun or heavy artillery movement at all either. You can still move infantry guns but without any vehicles. In conjunction with this to embark onto or off a vehicle or "enter" a building you use "mount" which seems rather off base for a term of embarking/debarking and entering buildings. Then the very ugly coins over the tops of units heads it makes the maps look clutterfusted and once again removes any immersion that one might get had they had stands.

I would invite anyone an everyone to just look at the tech support page as well already their are huge amounts of issues that have cropped up since release. Hardly what I would call a handful of people in a niche market like wargaming. Quite a lot in fact. SOme examples:
Game Freezes, Performance Issues turns take over a minute or two to complete, LOS issues, Random Generator script issues, CTD's, Menu lineup issues, Silo Building LOS Issues firing thru walls so to speak, Redownload issues after the fact. And many more.

This one just has too many elements missing to be THE wargame or the dethroner of Combat Mission and I would say no better than fair for quality and longevity. I'd stay on the fence on this one and wait for the 3rd installement which promises to include "everything" or almost everything that is missing in this one and not just portions as this one did and was just portions more than the origional PC:OWS.

Also, I would invite you to invest your money into EU:ROME as I believe it will be the better game of these two and it's release is just around the corner. There will be hours and hours of gameplay value out of it and it's much improved over EUIII. At least it offers a demo, download it and try it out. I'm finding it very impressive though of course it has it's issues as well.