First impressions:
30 seconds
awesome hand drawn installation screen that popped up (of panther)
I like the same look and feel for the starting panzercorp screen (just like battlefield academy) easy to pick screen rez from here. (however no enhanced or advanced options for visuals)
great opening movies with the king panzer for the game
when I was typing in my 30 seconds impressions i had a panzercorps.exe stop working crash (I am running dual monitors)
(so alt-tab / dual monitor caused a crash when the game was loading - this only happens then - not when the game is running after the opening movies) - The game loaded well when it was "primary" .. ie another program was not selected.
very nice tiger opening screen.
I like the campaign selection - with the posters based of historical photos. At first glance I saw there was not many scenarios - so i hope they unlock only as I complete the campaigns - I love unlocks (ie i enjoy working to unlock stuff - instead of having everything available at start) - however after looking around some more I noticed there was a selection screen at the bottom of the scenario secion that allowed you to pick the various scenarios based on the title. looks very nice and easy to figure out after my first thought that the scenarios were locked.
Tutorial campaign briefing - I would have liked to have a German voice over actor reading it. the brief was good and set the mood for the campaign though (just my thoughts that the voice actor would have been a nice touch) - this carries accross to the other campaigns as well - cheesie German English accent would also be acceptable
.5 minutes
the graphics looks great. tutorial seems to be very clear.
the menubar is very clean and nice
i like the maps (strategic and campaign map)
seems to play very much like pz general so far.
15 minutes
This game reminds me of a updated classic PzGen - so i think you met your goal ! The tutorial was very nice and clean. I could not get the "control click" to work on an enemy as per the tutorial. also I noticed the popup unit and info bars and really liked the touch.
i would not mind seeing the old combat movies added in - yes I would turn them off for sure later, but it would complete the pzgen impression
I like the rpg feel of the campaign briefings for the tutorial campaign - with a great in character explanation of the core units.
The intra-turn screen is very nice - it took me off guard by not having a "click to continue" button - and that the first time this screen disappeared right away with a click - the first impression was i did something wrong - but then i liked it later as it sped up the intra-turn downtime. maybe having a short tutorial message the first time explaining the screen and saying you just have to click through it (with no explicit button) would give the player a more "feel at ease" feeling - instead of (as my first impression) that they did something wrong - with realization later that they didn't
I am very much enjoying the game so-far. I would like to have an option maybe to have different colours for the core troops vs the non-core troops (instead of just the gold box) - maybe black uniforms or camo etc (or an upgrade option to have these cosmetic differences - maybe also a division or unit ID on the tanks ? (as in the German unit badges?) for core units).
1 hour
very nice game. I have enjoyed the tutorial missions up to now.
the only problem i have is in the upgrading section of the game.
the ui shows very nice the delta between the old and new unit (from the upgrade section). My only issue is I think the old and the new items should be named in the upgrade section of the screen. (a title bar for the columns)
in the left hand section of the upgrade section (just above the columns that show the old,new,delta figures - there should be something that spells out what column is what.
ie proposed, current (or something like that). It would just make the ui much cleaner in my opinion.
Performance
the game has been very stable , and runs well on a 2 monitor setup - on either the main or the projector screen in windows7 64bit. very clean and nice game so far !
Usability of UI and Main-screen
control intuitive ? very
UI convenient? very nice and easy to see
mouse interface? or other? the interface was very good - maybe a hotlink or popup page highlighting keyboard shortcuts would be nice.
What info is missing from UI sidebar ? - maybe a better explanation of what is a core unit - rather than only having a gold box around them
- also a re-naming function for the units (I have not explored to check if this is possible - i do know i used to rename the units quite often in the classic game). Note: I found how to re-name units (Alt-N) !
What info is missing from main-map view ? - perhaps unit strengths (only in higher rez) - or perhaps a dual monitor option to have the strategic map shown up all the time in the alternative monitor (this or other detail screens) .... just a thought.[/i]
