Panzer Command: Kharkov

April 23, 2008 - When it comes to gigantic land battles, nothing even comes close to Operation Barbarossa, the codename for the German invasion of Russia during the Second World War. Having become master of Europe, Hitler launched a massive surprise attack on his former Soviet allies that, over the course of a couple of years, would spawn several of history's largest battles. The action around the Ukranian city of Kharkov, known for its tank factories, was particularly dramatic, with the city changing hands several times as it was captured and recaptured again and again.
That historic series of battles is recreated in Koios Works' latest wargame, Panzer Command: Kharkov. Built on the foundation of 2006's Panzer Command: Operation Wintersun, and borrowing heavily from battlefront.com's landmark Combat Mission series, Panzer Command: Kharkov presents a thoroughly detailed simulation of combat on the Eastern Front but is nevertheless marred by some frequent interface problems.

The game is played at the tactical level with the player leading platoons of infantry and individual vehicles and benefiting from off-map resources like artillery and air support. Unit experience and morale rankings along with full ballistics and armor penetration models make Kharkov much more detailed than your average World War II strategy game and, fortunately, everything is laid out in a ridiculously detailed but well organized PDF manual. The only downside here is that the tutorial is a read-along affair, so you'll constantly be alt-tabbing back and forth to figure out just what's going on.
Each battle takes place on a sizeable 3D battlefield and the player is free to adjust the camera to get as close to or as far from the action as they'd like. It can actually be quite fun to follow a specific unit around and check out the battle from their limited perspective. Selecting a unit calls up a variety of stats and status indicators at the bottom of the screen, so you'll always know just how your boys are doing. We definitely would have liked to see some tool tips here and there, though, because some of the icons aren't as intuitive as the designers might have hoped.
Kharkov plays out in a format that's commonly called WEGO. Basically, the game is paused every forty seconds while both sides issue orders to their troops. Then the game resumes and plays out the next forty seconds in real time with no way for the players to influence the action. Then it pauses again and players can adjust their strategies based on how things progressed. While it's an admittedly artificial system, it's a nice way to merge the cerebral nature of turn-based strategy with the pants-wetting intensity of real-time games. The only problem here is that Koios has added some limitations that emphasize how arbitrary this system really is. In the case of Kharkov, every second turn is designated a "reaction" phase during which your choice of orders is severely limited. i've tried to think of a reason why you might be limited in your commands during one turn and not in another but it still doesn't make sense to me.

There are four campaigns here (five if you count the boot camp series of training missions), each of which offers a look at one of the major phases of the War around Kharkov. Ranging from just a few missions to a lengthy eight-mission run, the campaigns give you a chance to get attached to your units as they follow you from one battle to the next. While the idea of unit persistence is nice enough by itself, the promotions and medals they earn for successful action and the bonuses those confer in battle are really what make the experience particularly sweet. Trying to get a unit's bonus working during a battle while also trying not to put it into too much danger is one of the great balancing acts required by the campaign.
If a full campaign is too much to handle, each of the missions (and a few more besides) are available individually as separate battles. Most of the battles reflect the nature of the war, which means that assaults are much more common than meeting engagements. Nevertheless, there's a nice range of objectives and maps here and the variety is sure to increase thanks to the inclusion of several editors and generators that ship with the game. Any of these individual battles are available in Play-By-EMail form as well.
But for all that, Kharkov definitely stumbles a bit along the way. And it's all the more perplexing because they fail to address some key needs of the genre. To begin with, the "engage" command is a wonderful one-size-fits-all type of order but when you want to get specific about how you want your units to navigate the battlefield, you're in serious trouble.

We can deal with the fact that the infantry have to "mount" houses (even if it still sometimes doesn't seem to work) but there's no excuse for not including a way to plot waypoints for your units. Trying to tell your tanks to do something as simple as going around the left side of a house and then about face to back into a treeline is impossible unless you're willing to issue each step as a separate order between turns. Even in the case of house "mounting," the mount command can't be queued after a "rush" command so there's no way to order troops to run up to a house and go right in.
We'd also wish that the designers had more distinctly separated moving the movement of the entire platoon and its leader. The way the current system is, every order you give to your platoon leader is immediately followed by all of the units he's leading. That means every time you give a platoon leader an order that you don't want the rest of the platoon to carry out, you have to change their moves individually.

The game also fails to provide adequate battlefield awareness. Sure, you can pop little icons up over the units' heads, but it's still hard to take in the big picture without losing the ability to distinguish between your mortar and machine gun teams. It's easy enough to keep it in your head for the smaller battles, but it can really get out of control once the forces start piling up.
We love the true line-of-sight and spotting rules in the game. No wargame worthy of the name would be without them. But as the overall battlefield commander, I'm not crazy about my own line of sight limited by which unit I have selected. In Kharkov only the enemies that the currently selected unit can see are displayed on the map regardless of whether or not there are other friendly units that can see them. I appreciate the intent behind this design but it's really taking things much too far and limiting my own ability to make a sound battle plan based on the information from all of my units.
There's a similar lack of information in terms of path plots and target designations. While you can see the movement and fire orders of your currently selected unit (and even platoon, if you can find the shortcut key), there's no way in between turns to see all the plots and targets at once. This makes synchronizing movements much more difficult than it needs to be and limits your ability to predict how the battle's going to progress over the next few turns.
Games of this type aren't often known for having great visuals and Kharkov proudly continues that tradition. It isn't, of course, that we're expecting the same types of graphics we saw in Company of Heroes; games like Kharkov just don't put that kind of focus on their visual presentation. That doesn't mean that we necessarily excuse flat textures and boxy unit models but there's just so much else going on in the engine (line of sight, ballistics, spotting, etc.) that the concept of whether or not it actually looks pretty seems to have been largely ignored. It's true that the unit designs are realistic (in details if not appearance) but the explosions and smoke effects would've looked old five years ago.

The environments are equally simplistic, with cross-poly trees and big flat textures that tile all the way across the map. There are some nice touches here, like the shadows and the impressive sky boxes, but after playing Theatre of War, we just can't go back to games that don't even bother to hide the seams between the playing area and the flat, featureless horizon. We've also noticed that some of the projectiles seem to garble the textures a bit, and the result makes it look like the soldiers are shooting green laser bolts at each other.
Sound is another area where wargames developers aren't particularly diligent. The sound effects here are fairly thin and few in number, so they grow tiresome rather quickly. The endless symphony of p-tows, rrrrrs, and chukka-chukas will have you muting the game within the first few hours, which is a shame considering the music is actually fairly well done.


Closing Comments
The shadow of Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin looms very large over Koios' latest effort. Not only does it cover exactly the same theater (and more besides) but it also doesn't suffer from some of the more infuriating interface problems that we kept running into in this game. Barbarossa to Berlin also happens to be a bit less expensive than Panzer Command: Kharkov as well.
But based purely on its own merits, Kharkov is actually a very thorough and detailed simulation of Eastern Front warfare. The unit details, the combat modeling, and the missions themselves are more than enough to please more hardcore wargamers. It's just a shame that controlling your units and reading the battlefield require so much more effort from the player.





7.5
PresentationA satisfying choice of theater and lots of thorough documentation. Still, it doesn't go out of its way to make it convenient to play.
5.5
GraphicsLooking good isn't one of the game's goals. Chunky models and muddy textures abound. Good attention to detail on the units.
5.0
SoundP-tow! P-tow! The excellent music is buried beneath a suite of terrible sound effects.
7.5
GameplayBrilliant combat modeling but hampered by a lack of situational awareness and more sophisticated controls.
7.5
Lasting AppealThe battles are definitely enjoyable and the editors and generator give it long legs. Still, the overall enjoyment wanes thin too soon.
6.7Passable
OVERALL(out of 10 / not an average)