So, anime and tanks. Quite clearly a duo that have been destined to be brought together for the ages. It’s been done before, not least in Valkyria Chronicles, a series I have a fondness for. Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition is rather more on the nose about its subject matter, but the prospect of anime tank battles playing out amongst the battlefields of World War 2 isn’t inherently preposterous. So it is, we have Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition.

First released in 2021 to PC, it’s made its long and arduous journey across the battlefield to reach the shores of consoles. Does it arrive with the power of Blitzkrieg or run aground part way through its assault?

Command & Falter

Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition is majoritively made up of its campaign, which roughly follows the German Wehrmacht through World War 2. It loosely joins together various battles, beginning with the invasion of Poland, through the collapse of France and then into the quagmire defeat of Operation Barbarossa in Russia. I found it oddly entertaining to follow overly dramatic anime handlers speaking about famous conflicts, including notable engagements like Dunkirk.

This is, however, not a very good story. Your two mission briefing handlers have the most personality, as they’re the only ones with scripted lines, and any actual character. Your tank crews can be swapped out at any time, so instead of having any traits, they have dreary text lines doled out by whoever is filling which slot in the menu. While there are text logs you can unlock for each member, they did very little to fill the gap of having any discernable personality on display through the majority of the game.

The game does do a good job of getting the details about operations and battles correct, to its credit. Given most anime titles live and die by sword of having likeable or engaging parties, though, Panzer Knights has next to nothing to offer in this regard. Lightweight and flimsy, its story chassis would be destroyed by a meagre hand grenade, never mind a tank shell.

Out of The Frying Pan(zer) and Into The Fire

Embarking on missions has you taking control of your chosen tank, manned by the crew selected in the menu. There are a hefty number of options available, offering varying playstyles from fast-yet-brittle, to slow-but-marauding. I discovered from the outset that the M26 Pershing is, effectively, invincible, thus stuck with that for the entire game. This thing is so heavily armoured in fact, I neither died nor failed a mission once.

While Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition suggests it’s a strategy title, there’s next to no strategy involved. You roll up to your objective, lay waste to everything in sight, rinse repeat until you finish said objective. Often, it boils down to “kill X enemies” or “hold Y position”, hardly riveting stuff. I had the option of calling in artillery, but the map marking system was so inaccurate it wasn’t worth bothering with.

Additionally, though you have three ammo types, only two of them are ever particularly useful. One is armour piercing… and 90% of the enemies are… tanks… with armour. Doesn’t take a degree to work out what’s going to be most prudent. The moment-to-moment gameplay is serviceable and does the job, but there’s next to nothing else to think about other than aiming and shooting. Occasionally you’ll need to resupply or you’ll be on a timer, but it’s very barebones.

Armoured Bore

What didn’t help my ebbing enthusiasm, was the wonky aiming and hit detection. Rogue geometry and terrain is frequent, which makes lining up the two required redicules akin to throwing darts while drunk and high at the same time. Even the most minor of elevation differences throws this crosshair into a spin. It made it a real challenge for me to get invested or immersed in the experience, alongside the drab objective types.

Enemy armoured AI is also fairly basic, opting for just driving right at you and opening fire. There’s an element of maneuvering to hit weak points, but often these are positioned slap-bang at the front of enemy tanks, so even that’s eliminated from the strategy front. I rolled through the campaign largely on autopilot as a result, not really hating my time with Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition, but not really liking much of it either.

Completing missions earns currency which you can spend to unlock new crew members, tanks and upgrades for your squad. Each crew member has their own passive buffs, improved and expanded through 5 tiers of levelling up. These can be fairly substantial, especially if you stack benefits from synergised members, which I appreciated when tinkering a bit.

The Knight’s Watch

With Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition having anime visuals and five years of post-release time to be worked on, you’d expect the game to run fairly well on consoles. Sadly, that was not my experience. The game’s environments are absolutely barren, aside from enemies and randomly placed buildings. It harkened back to my PS2 days, where big maps where often sparsely populated and had those rough, jagged texture shapes.

Still, I’m not a stickler for that kind of thing, and can look past it fairly easily. What I cannot look past though, is the technical performance. If you thought a Tiger II was slow, lord have mercy on you. Longer play sessions (read: about an hour) caused the framerate to plunge to single digits, barely registering movements anymore. I’d have to restart the console every time to fix it. Texture pop-in is as rampant as a German Blitzkrieg assault, and on a couple of occasions the controls locked up entirely.

The game is playable and most of these grievances were things I could tolerate, but usually it comes with the caveat of performance suffering from the game pushing beyond its limits, but this isn’t the kind of game that’s pushing any limits. Porting a game to console of course comes with its own development challenges, but this needed a bit more work to polish up the barrel before being ready to fire.

A Knight To Forget

I romped through Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition in a couple of play sessions and about 5 hours. I neither regret nor condone that time. It’s the kind of game you play when you don’t want to think too much, but just want to blow up a bunch of things without any consideration. There’s a good amount of variety in tanks and crew members to pick from, but you also just don’t need to, if you’re not inclined. I certainly wasn’t.

As such, it falls right in the middle of our scale. It’s a competent, average video game that is perfectly fine, but little else. The combination of anime, tanks and World War 2 might seem mismatched to some, but should you be open minded to that cocktail, there’s a slightly thirst quenching shot available to you here. I just wish it was in a better technical state and had a bit more of the actual strategy that was suggested.

Panzer Knights: Commander’s Edition is available from August 13th on PlayStation 5 (review platform) and Xbox Series X|S. Panzer Knights is already available on PC.

Developer: JoyBrick
Publisher: PQube

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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