Gamecloud - What can you tell us about the single player campaign in Codename: Panzers Phase Two?

Mario Kroll - The single player campaign will allow players to enjoy the missions from three perspectives: the Anglo-American Allies, the German-Italian Axis, or the Yugoslavian resistance forces. There's going to be a large variety of missions to challenge the gamer, and we've added new units, locales and weaponry to the game to reflect the new campaigns. Each campaign will offer a huge mix of primary, secondary and secret missions, which should significantly boost the single player game play (as well as the cooperative multi-player experience).

Sure to be well-received will be the games modding tools, which will allow you to edit units, missions and even in-game cut scenes. It almost feels like you could build your own new game with the engine, and we expect gamers to have a lot of fun with this.

The strategic "feel" of Panzers: Phase Two is rather interesting. As in the original, this is not a "build, fire, and forget" RTS. Players enter battles with a particular force of units that are almost impossible to replace without salvaging one from the battlefield. In fact, this dynamic has actually been enhanced for the sequel as tanks now sport a "temperature gauge" that measures their heat. Train a flamethrower on a tank long enough, or hit it with a Molotov cocktail and you can get the crew to bail, gun them down, and salvage the hardware. In fact, according to publisher CDV, the game's unit statistics have been tweaked at the behest of their fans to bring them much closer to their real-world counterparts. That means that strategy and tactical positioning is even more important as you simply don't want to let your mostly obsolete M15 (one of the game's new units) try to go head-to-head with any of the more modern tanks in the game. Hit-and-run from the rear is the order of the day with the M15.