Panzer Tactics

Good game design is a bit like mixing a good cocktail. You need the right ingredients (the bits of the design), the right container (or phone, in this case), and the right approach.

With cocktails, there might be one element you really like, but if you put too much of it in the drink it'll ruin the overall taste. Equally, mixing a drink by just randomly tipping in a bit of everything (otherwise known as a top-row special) is never going to create a flavoursome result. And that leads us, neatly-ish, to Panzer Tactics.

Panzer Tactics is a strategy war game; not a real-time strategy, or a role-playing strategy, but a good, old-fashioned strategy war game like the ones played on tabletops with little figures. Such war games are usually seriously deep, complex productions, with pages of rules about how each unit can fire, move, defend, and gain ground. Battles often take hours – even days – to play.

And what developer 10TACLE has tried to do is squeeze one of those onto a mobile phone.

Basic play is of the 'select unit, move cursor to where you want unit to go, decide whether to attack nearby enemy or do something else' ilk. In other words, Panzer Tactics is a turn-based war strategy affair; you and the game take turns moving your units into position and attacking one another. Furthermore, the units have to be moved around a hexagonal grid (six directions of movement), which is a bit fiddly compared to a square grid (where you'd have four directions).

Sounds complicated? You betcha.

Let's take the training mission as illustrative of the game's complexity. With the cursor placed over open ground there are nine icons around the screen, plus three on the battlefield. Move the cursor over the first unit and another eight icons appear. That makes 21 pieces of information to take in.

Move a unit and another four selection icons appear. Click 'Info' and a window with 13 more icons pops-up (some are repeated from the main screen, to be fair). After moving your first piece, five pages of instructions pop-up.

Within another move, you're told you can now obtain new units. But you're not really told how. And when you do find the relevant screen, each unit has a price attached to it but there's no indication on-screen of how many credits you have to spend – the only way to find out is to go back two menus to the main screen. This leads us onto our second major issue with Panzer Tactics: despite all this data, it's never very clear what's going on.

In Advance Wars on the DS, any battle between units is (unless you chose to switch it off) clearly depicted in a little scene that shows the fight and its outcome. Yes, that's a console and this is a phone, but 10TACLE is deliberately gunning towards DS territory with the huge amount of content it's offering.

In Panzer Tactics, fights happen almost instantly, after which a tiny number visible under the unit (its remaining strength) decreases. More seriously, it seems that you can pitch a tank against a squad of troops and both suffer similar damage. That feels – and in terms of delivering enjoyable gameplay – is unfair.

Panzer Tactics might have been a great game. There has clearly been a lot of work put into its production: the graphics are well crafted and detailed (almost too detailed at times, with tiny icons struggling to accurately represent real-life war machines), and a huge campaign mode that's playable as Allied, Axis or Soviet forces (strangely Axis – the Germans – is the default). But that mass of content is also the major problem, because Panzer Tactics simply drowns in it.

If more focus had gone into better paring down a huge game from the PC world into a well-tuned mobile title, with clear information and a sensible difficulty curve, then it could have been a real killer game – an Advance Wars for mobiles to rival the likes of Ancient Empires 2.

As it is, kicking-off the first mission of the Allied campaign with 27 tiny air, land and naval units spread across two battlefronts (one of which is so far away we didn't even realise it was there at first) is something akin to a badly mixed cocktail. We just don't want to drink it, no matter how thirsty we are.