Panzer General II

The Good
It's true that the SSI folks indeed fixed any number of problems in the original PG engine with this new release. For instance the support between units is better, and artillery no longer has to be right beside another unit in order to help it defend itself. Units strengths and weaknesses seem to be better balanced out as well, which makes infantry useful once again. They also added a "go to next unmoved unit" button which is very useful.

The Bad
To start with the graphics for PG II are downright horrid. Although the game seems to have been designed for more powerful machines than the original, everything about it is worse.

For one thing the "active" part of the screen (the map you can see as opposed to the entire map) is tiny, meaning you don't really have a good picture of the overall battle without a ton of scrolling. This is a result of making each hex considerably larger so that they could put in larger unit icons that turned to face their attackers and such. But then they got that wrong too, I don't know if it's the color palette or just the images themselves, but the various unit graphics are downright horrid. You simply can't tell one unit from another without selecting it, an issue that simply didn't exist in the original.

But by far the worst problem is the terrain graphics. To start with they are a blend of the very same colors that make up the units, which as you might imagine, makes the units almost invisible against the backgrounds. Without the "next unmoved unit" button you'd forever be overlooking your own units. In addition when you are actually moving units, the "shaded hexes" which show you where you can move to are likewise almost invisible, once again simply because they picked a color you simply can't see. Check out the screen shots for this article, notice how the infantry units are the same color of the trees in the winter artwork? Duh.

Then, not content to leave well enough alone, they went about "fixing" the UI. As a result I find the game practically indecipherable. Trivial tasks like re-enforcing your units after taking combat damage I can no longer find - there's no "re-enforce" button anywhere in the various annoying little sliding menus. None of the button graphics are useful anyway, an open book is the icon you use to buy new units? Who came up with that one?

Worse the game displays considerably less info on the screen than it used to. In the past (and future) a single status bar told you information about the selected item, strength, experience, supplies, name, type, location, terrain, everything. In this version they only give you the name and type. Yes, you can see the strength on the icon itself, but if there's a way to find the supply status, I can't find it. Things like experience are buried two menus deep under a silly screen that takes up the entire window and is largely empty anyway.

Inter-mission settings were cleaned up a little, taking you to a screen where you can upgrade your units before deployment. However they managed to get even this wrong, because the whole upgrading experience is bizare and difficult to use. I was forever trying to figure out what units I did have and what they were like, and I still can't figure out how to upgrade a unit from (say) a truck to a half-track.

Confusing this was the fact that the same information screen would take on any number of very different forms depending on some internal logic. Selecting one of my artillery pieces would bring up a completely different info window than the other, apparently based on their experience level.

And then the campaign mode is equally horrid. You now start in Spain which I liked, on a mission called Madrid. Interesting then that Madrid appears nowhere on the map. Sigh. You then move onto Poland, but unlike the original PG where there were two battles spanning the country, here there is only a single mission, and due to the oversized graphics it appears like it's spanning my back yard.

The biggest problem is that they were willing to sacrifice ANYTHING in order to make the graphics fancier. As a result the missions represent much smaller parts of the world than they used to. No more battle for Norway, no, that would require the rivers to be little blue lines, and where would we put the pretty reflections? Instead we battle for Lillhammer alone, that will leave plenty of room, heck, we can even put in telephone poles! Uhhh, this is a strategic game? Hello?

What a way to ruin a classic game.

The Bottom Line
I simply cannot recommend playing this one. The earlier PG games (PG, AG, PacGen etc.) had largely the same gameplay, but were far far easier to play. And if the 3D graphics really means anything, the later PG III series is far superior in every which way. Stay away from this one!