The first Steel Panthers game deals with the World War 2, the battles take place in Europe, Africa and Pacific. You can control all the big parties of the war like Germany, Soviet Union, USA and Great Britain. But that's not all, the game also lets you to choose smaller countries like Finland and Poland for example.
Steel Panthers gives you a lot of to play - single scenarios, pre-made campaigns, campaigns which go through the whole war. The game has also a battle generator which creates random maps and a map editor which of course is for making your own battle maps. Multiplayer is possible with a same computer or with the email-game. There's no support for modem or network game.
The unit selection in Steel Panthers is huge, you can find nearly every tank, airplane or infantry weapons that were used in World War 2. Each unit has its own weapons, speed, armor, morale and range for example. If you're interested in weapons used in WW2, you probably find yourself browsing the weapon encyclopedia.
The first thing you notice in the game's battle system are the graphics, because the graphics are a lot better than usually in turn-based wargames. Each turn begins with an artillery or an airplane strike (if available). During the turn you can move your units, shoot and assign targets for your artillery or airplanes. When you end your turn, your opponent's turn begins after that it's your turn again, and so on. Your units may shoot on enemy's turn if possible. The battle system is almost as easy as in real time strategy games but it still doesn't make Steel Panthers as easy as most of the RTS games, for example in SP shooting against your troops will reduce the morale and your men might even panic or surrender. Officer can try to rise your men's morale and save routed troops to do this press "r".
The AI in Steel Panthers is the only bad thing I can find from the game - sometimes AI gives itself the highest priority destroy harmless infantry instead of closing tanks. AI's artillery is also too accurate - it always knows the place of your troops.
There are also a few bugs which are fixed in updates so you better get the patches also.

Oh yeah, and the sound effects, what about those, lets say that you have to do a big search to find better sound effects. For example machine guns with a smaller caliber have a different sound than bigger caliber machine guns. Music are also good wargame-music, although there are no music in the ripped version.

Overall Steel Panthers is the best wargame I've ever played and I can recommend it even to people who have only played real-time-strategy games before.

Size: 14811K
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