Panzer Elite

Panzer Elite took players into tank battles of the Second World War on the Western Front, where they could fight on the side of either the German Wehrmacht or the Allied forces, and offered a campaign following the crew of a single tank across several years of the conflict, with a gradual upgrade of equipment matching the historical development of armored vehicles. The player could move between different positions inside the tank, from commander to gunner to driver, which gave the game a distinctive sense of connection with the crew and their fate over the course of the long campaign.

The game relied on a fairly realistic model of ballistics and damage, where the outcome depended on the type of ammunition, the angle of impact, and the specific spot hit on the hull or turret of the enemy vehicle, and the open battlefields allowed players to choose between a cautious advance using terrain cover and a more aggressive, direct approach. The graphical rendering of the terrain, villages, and vehicles was decent for the turn of the millennium, with clearly recognizable silhouettes of individual tank types, and the audio, with crew reports in the national languages of both sides, nicely underscored the authenticity of whichever front the player found themselves on. Switching between positions inside the tank also forced the player to alternate between the roles of observer, gunner, and driver depending on what the specific battlefield situation required at the moment.

Panzer Elite won favor among tank simulator fans through its combination of a personal view of the crew with an elaborate model of the armored vehicles of both warring sides, and through the length of its campaign, which followed the war's development from its early years to its conclusion. Today the game is interesting especially as one of the few titles of its time to offer a symmetrical view of the conflict from both sides of the front line, similar to what flight simulators focused on the Battle of Britain had done a few years earlier. It is precisely this two-sided perspective and the personal bond with one particular crew that give the campaign an emotional dimension usually missing from purely tactical titles.

Why play it: Thanks to its symmetrical view of the conflict from both warring sides and the personal bond with one particular crew, it offers a campaign with an emotional dimension usually missing from purely tactical tank simulators.