Panzer Knights is a tank arcade shooter, somewhere between World of Tanks and Girls und Panzer. No PvP like WoT, but not lighthearted and cheerful like GuP is.

The story and gameplay of the game is quite simple: the player is the commander of a new squad of the german Panzertruppe, fresh from training and thrown into the fires of World War 2. From the fields of Poland, to the Ardenne Forest, French cities and Operation Barbarossa is everything included where the Panzertruppen fought in their parts of the war. Before every mission we can choose from a number of soldiers to take a ride and a tank of our liking. From the small Panzer II to the mighty King Tiger and even captured tanks you have a solid choice.
You will also be followed into battle by a small number of AI tanks, which will support you and stick with you during your missions.

Before every mission you also have a small briefing about the upcoming battlefield, goals and you even learn something about the real battles fought in the war.
While there is some small conversation between characters why they fight, how they believe they do the right or sometimes even questions certain decisions, it's not really important for the game and you will forget about it pretty fast.

The controlls are easy and if you ever played a game like World of Tanks or War Thunder, you will master them without problems and even as a newbie it's easy to understand.

Sounds like a solid game, right? Yes! But actually no...
All the basics, like the controlls, are working. But everything else collapse almost immediately:

Only eleven missions and three side missions to play... with 30 tanks to choose from! But only if you have enough medals! You don't have them? How about you repeat these missions to grind them? With tanks from 1943 against tanks from 1939!
You don't want to? Then have fun to fight enemy tanks which easily outmatch you! From Mission 2 until Mission What-So-Ever!
The King Tiger? You can only play him after you finished the last mission! If you don't want to repeat those, you will never drive him!

Ammunition that doesn't work as intended! Why is HE the best round in game, even when used on a 20mm autocannon? Why does AP and APCR almost feel the same?

The Enviroment is a disaster! Rocks have big hitboxes, making it impossible to shoot over them or past them. Invisible walls where invisible walls don't belong, like hills and bridges. Flowers and grass spawning in front of you all of a sudden. FPS dropping from 60 to 15 because... reasons? Driving through trees without a hitbox, or driving into trees with hitboxes! You never know! Builidings you can destroy, but a truck next to them stopped my tank.

And then... the AI. If you want to call it like that, because there is a lot of "A" but a lack of "I"!
Enemy tanks will not react to your actions: shoot over them, shoot next to them! They will do nothing. It's seems much nicer to watch some clouds rather to defend your home. But once we remember them that they are fighting in a war and give them a hit, they all start to swarm you. Standing in a defence position? Nah! Forward, comrades! And they won't stop until they almost stand next to you. Again and again. What would be easy, if they couldn't hit you while driving or penetrate your armour with any gun. Something you can't do!

But you still have the strongest weapon of all... driving towards them. Or around them. They are easily overwhelmed if you get too close to them and they stop to fire at you or do anything at all.

Your team AI isn't better at their job. You can't give them orders, only force them into one of three formations: line formation, V formation or stand still. Otherwise they have a terrible pathfinding and never help you in a fight since they have a potato aim or are too slow to follow.

Panzer Knights is a game that could be good in a gaming market with little to no tank arcade games. But in it's current state I'm amazed that it's launched as a full game and not in Early Access. If they somehow solve all these problems, it could be a okay-ish game. Solid, not great, but solid. Right now it's not worth 20 bucks for a game, that is definitly unfinished. If you still want to play it... wait for a sale. Or buy a better game...

[Disclaimer]: I was an early supporter for this title and waited to give them time to further this project before reviewing it. I personally paid £5.00~ during Early Access and £2.46 for the DLC after the M26 was added to the pack.

[Summary]
Panzer Knights is ambitious in it's goals but it's going to need a lot more work still. There's tons of optimisations, improvements, user experience changes and content additions needed. Joybrick's focus on the main mechanics, content and a relatively simple narrative to follow does show commitment. They have made admirable progress from the early days and there is enough content, just not for what they're currently asking (even on sale).

Not Recommended. Not particularly egregious in terms of quality. Buy at your own risk.

[What does Panzer Knights do right?]
The direct core mechanics are a solid, (mostly) stable infrastructure for Panzer Knights to work with. Joybrick's concept is good and the moment-to-moment gameplay ranges from action-filled and tense in the more compact and busy missions to serviceable in the open and long-ranged missions. Some scenes are memorable and stick well, such as the main mission on Kursk. They have offered various vehicles and crew to play with, customise and upgrade which gives completionists content for hours to unlock.

Joybrick's team has shown a clear dedication to create a campaign and most of a storyline - aside from the somewhat jarring change of the front that the player is fighting on. I believe they can expand the story with different nations and extended campaigns, such as how Company of Heroes did DLC in their first series title (Opposing Front, Tales of Valor).
I think the additional missions for challenge are a nice touch as they give extra post-game content to clear when you get the heavier hitters such as the Tiger 2.

The game rarely crashes and rarely has any issues loading content. Most of the title itself is stable enough to be playable on average hardware, though at low-medium settings. Moment-to-Moment experience should see you running at around 30FPS (realistic frame-rate). Joybrick have fixed many bugs since the early days that made the game almost unplayable.

If JoyBrick were to add other campaigns with the vehicles currently in-game or alternatively drop the price back to Early Access and offer DLC Bundles of Vehicles with Missions/Campaigns, there could be some merit to picking up the title. The framework is there, it just needs polish.

[What does Panzer Knights do wrong?]
Panzer Knights biggest flaw is the user experience.

Joybrick has created a solid concept which isn't hard to get into (especially if you're familiar with World of Tanks or War Thunder) but they have done mistakes I've seen many make when using game engines. They haven't properly optimised the game, even though there have been attempts.

User Interface elements outside of battle is sluggish at times and needs an overhaul given it's either heavily unfinished or overly cluttered nature. I cannot see a reason to restrict the game as heavily as they have to the select few items they have. Some sections are hard to follow due to lack of clarity stemming from colour palette and identifying which roles belong where can be hard when selecting a vehicle because you can put drivers in commander roles, gunners in radio roles and similar without even being warned or having the crew list filtered accordingly.

Controls inside of battle can be extremely buggy. You can tilt and break the camera consistently just by holding right mouse button, rotating the camera and entering then exiting gunner sights whilst the tank is on a slight incline. Holding right mouse button can lead to the gun being stuck for extended periods of time during missions, sometimes requiring a mission restart to fix and other times just a few times entering and exiting gunner sights. The turret can stop responding at any time to mouse movements when not damaged due to dialog scenes and character interactions.

Missions can be a gigantic mess. Some AI will never wake up, others will go the most convoluted pathway possible (e.g. Opel Blitz trucks on side quests in missions like Operation Barbarossa II). Pathfinding is practically in shambles for most of your time as AIs will be heavily delayed by even the slightest obstacles - such as their own allies. Mission Objectives can get stuck quite frequently, causing the necessity for a level restart. a T-26 can entirely negate the weight and horsepower of a Tiger 2 or M26 Pershing. This may be due to an oversight with vehicle weight and power ratio or that may not even be scripted in at all. I've very rarely encountered issues where AIs can be invincible. Sometimes this happens because they spawned in and you try to shoot them whilst still, other times it happens because they're stuck.

Performance itself is not the best. There are often too many things in a level being stored that are almost always never seen again. Dead tanks linger but looking at them can possibly cause minor lag spikes in performance. Despite reporting a 60FPS frame-rate consistently through steam's frame-counter, the game runs at a lot lower framerate as revealed by external tools and a gigantic monitor running at 4K60Hz. I cannot directly tell if this was a stylistic choice scripted into the camera or game engine to fit the general "Anime" aesthetic. Your Hardware - even if it fits under the recommended specifications - may not run this game well.

The storyline skips some of the real conflict timeline a bit. The concept itself is underutilised because of the messy and buggy missions that exist. Even with some fun moment-to-moment sequences of action in each mission, the moment you complete the campaign is where further play leads to diminishing returns. Once you finish the last mission and maybe get the Tiger 2 from replaying a few missions, there's nothing else to bother with because unlockables and the requirements can be fairly obscure as well as entirely unnecessary. Some of the extra content outside of the main missions could have been considered as main campaign missions since they take place between the events.

Other Reviewers have run into bugs on translations, maps, vehicle loadouts and hardware/performance issues. Their reviews should also be considered before purchase.

[Panzer Vor...?]
At the price I paid, Panzer Knights was worth it and so was the DLC (for the length of time it actually was functional), but the title is not worth the current price of admission, not even at the current sale (4 May 2022 - £15.36 instead of £20.49).

The negatives outweigh the positives to the average consumer looking to directly buy a game for the gameplay. Performance is poor, even with some of the highest specs you can get in a machine. The storyline doesn't offer much for a narrative or context with better inference being drawn from a wikipedia article on the battles and locations being drawn on for inspiration by JoyBrick. The game isn't really replayable and there's very few memorable moments - though they will stick out when you think of the game.

I will not recommend this game, but I still enjoy it's gloriously buggy and unpolished edges. Only buy this if you are willing to support a development team who are actively (though slowly) attempting to fix a game that shares similarities to World of Tanks, War Thunder and Girls Und Panzer: Dream Tank Match.

Sincerely hoping that JoyBrick does continue to release more for this title and start running more community engagement through services like Discord

[Relevant Specs & Resolutions]

CPU: Intel i9-10900F
GPU: RTX 3060ti Factory OC (8GB)
RAM: Kingston Fury RGB 4x32GB (128GB)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z590 UD AC
PSU: Seasonic Focus 850W
OS Storage: WD SN550 512GB
Game Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
Main Display: LG 43NANO756PR

OS: Windows 11 Professional
OS Resolution: 3840x2160
Game Resolution: 1920x1080

Stupid World of Tonks inspired wannabe

- no checkpoints
- bad optimalization
- invisible borders in places with no logic
- VN style story I do not care to read
- T-34/76 is not T-34/76

Playing Panzer Knights was a...conflicting experience.

On one hand, the character art is great, the tanks are well modeled, the visual style is put together nicely and works well, the map destruction is well done and really cool, and the moment to moment gameplay is surprisingly solid and fun.

On the other, the game's extremely rudimentary AI, basic missions, poor voice line choices, a lack of any real compelling story or characters and GOD AWFUL performance on systems that should be crushing this cartoony tank game make it impossible to recommend to people who I know would enjoy this game.

I 100%ed the game in about 12-13 hours. Which was completing all missions, unlocking all the tanks and crew and getting all the achievements.

I would give the game a solid 3/5, and a rather sad "Not Recommended." 25$ is a lot of money for a game like this. Even at the sale price of 18$ it's a dubious purchase. If you can pick it up for between $5-10 then I'd say go for it.

Basically, World of Tanks style single player arcade action in an anime universe.( I guess it's budget Girls und Panzer? never played the ps4 game or watched the show) It's rough at the moment, controls need work, the sniper camera some times puts the camera in weird places jumping back to third person, throttle/braking lag needs to be tightened up or at least get rid of spacebar as primary fire and have it as brake, only 3 main missions one being a training course and 1 side quest. Menu placeholders for camp, recruiting and garage are in place so there will be a progression system with units that you put together as it seems there is a formation button in game. I will add that I found the reload times to be adequate, not sure what Tank_Hunter is talking about it taking an hour to reload. Pretty damn neat concept and it seems if they follow through with the groundwork they've laid, it should be really good. Here's hoping.
unfortunately they didn't fix any of the issues, graphics options are none existence, draw distance is very bad and control mapping is very limited. Its quite disappointing.

A lot of potential, especially if you like tanks, but there are some serious gameplay issues and bugs.

If you liked Girls und Panzer you will take an immediate liking to the art style. The cell shading looks fantastic. Both the tanks and characters are very well done.

Varied terrain so switching between column and wedge formation can be important. They should probably be using a staggered column not a column.

The story, where you play as a group of German tankers might be a little off-putting to some. They try to explain history in the dialogue, and with the translations which are currently a little iffy. They might have been better to stick closer to a GuP storyline, where tanking is a girls high school sport like softball.

I think they are trying to make sure all the vehicles work for every faction, so there is a limited number of missions, and I think this leads to problems with the difficulty scaling. After first mission I upgraded to a Panzer III, then in the next mission your are faced with French S35's that neither you or your allies can penetrate.

You can redo missions and grind up money, but I don't want to be using a 1942 tank in 1940.. Hopefully they will insert additional missions so the difficulty curve makes more sense.

It's currently in EA, and this is one I would hold off on until it hits release, especially at a $25 price point.

I'll update as the game progresses.

This game is fun. However, at its current state I cannot recommend it. The dialogues flicker between English and Mandarin randomly - even during the crucial training mission. Air drop timer is ridiculously short. The grind needed to get new tank and crew is quite long. Will update the review once fixes have been applied.

Buy at sale.

It is a arcade casual tank game which follows the battle path of German from Poland campaign to Kurksk (too short, may be DLC for the reset of 1943-1945). Pro side is good scenario design, good art. But cons side is GPU/CPU extensive with such level of graphic, to me it is around Sony PS2 level.

It still good play if you want to solo kill time instead of stressful man vs man in war thunder/WOT.

You liked the Panzer/Tank part from Valkyria Chronicles? You like Girls und Panzer? Furthermore, you're sad that GuP: Dream Tank Match never got released on PC?
IS THIS FINALLY YOUR CHANCE/GAME YOU WAITED FOR?! Nein.

I wanted to like this game and... yeah, no... it's just not really possible. It's not unplayable bad or anything, it's just so basic and simple that even your last 2 weeb brain cells are going to be bored - nothing ever requires proper positioning, movement or aiming. Simple as, sadly.
And for an arcade style game, it's just annoying that there are no save spots. All missions are basically the same and just "Reach point X and destroy all tanks/AT guns you see". Sometimes you have to babysit some Opel Blitz and be quick enough to destroy all enemies. Yeah, that's it, and having to repeat a mission because something stupid happened... much fun! There are 12 Main Missions and 4 Extra ones, all being basically the same.

The AI is absolutely retarded. They just bum rush you, sometimes not even shooting (it's the same for enemies or allies). Sometimes enemies will just sit there while you shoot at them, at other times they will immediately rush you (and get stuck at destroyed tanks). AT guns are generally a joke and require 0 attention. Oh and a lot of things will just eat your shells. That tank turret you see over the wall? Try shooting it, an invisible wall on top will make your shell disappear. You positioned yourself behind a rock, being all sneaky/laying in ambush? The shell will ALWAYS hit the rock, your gun can not reach over it.

Are the animu grills at least worth it? Can you interact with them, maybe even build up some friendship and nice cutscenes? Of course not. There is a friendship system, but it's always between two characters that have to be present in a certain mission. If they are present, you get a cutscene with a few sentences and a character description/overview. That's it.

On a technical note, the engine of the game is just as bad. Even on high-end hardware, the FPS are bad (talking not even 60fps on a RTX2070 Super + AMD R9 5900X). Reducing grass/shadows etc. to low solves it a bit...but that is just laughable considering how the game looks.
And let's not mention the typewriter sound at every letter that gets written, activate the slow setting for text and just hit left mouse at every line... BGM? It often cuts out and there are like 2 or 3 tracks available. Sometimes the game is literally and completely silent. All tanks/guns sound the same, and the motor sound is pretty annoying.

Get it for super cheap on sale, don't get the extra tank DLC. Play through it, be disappointed, rewatch Girls und Panzer: Der Film.

I bought the Complete Collection on sale for ~$15 and ended up feeling disappointed. I was expecting a cheap, but fun experience and unfortunately it just doesn't meet some basic standards.

Starting with the good,

1. Graphics are decently nice, very reminiscent of Valkyria Chronicles to me.
   
2. Character designs look good and there is voice acting during combat, similar to voice-lines you would experience from WoT.
   
3. Nice variety of tanks to play and the DLC included with the bundle, at least on sale, felt worth it to me. Tanks were much better compared to a lot of tanks you have and need to unlock, which would reduce any grinding time as well.
   
4. Destructible environments is a nice touch.
   
5. Mod support! Basically just amounts to reskins of tanks and replacing crew members with either portraits from Company of Heroes, or the girls from Girls und Panzer.

Now the bad,

1. Options were pretty limited. In fact, the max resolution you can select is 1920x1080. I can't remember the last time a game didn't allow me to select a native resolution, there are so many games on GOG that are older and have ultra-widescreen support now.
   
2. The draw distance, my god the draw distance is one of the worst I've ever experienced. Look at my profile, I've played a lot of games. It was extremely jarring from the very first tutorial mission. On said mission there are a lot of trees and they pop-in ~100 feet away from you. Watch the trailer again on the store page, you can actually catch the pop-in around the 0:15-0:18 mark on the right side with the grass. Also pay attention to how most tanks they showcase are either moving very slowly or not moving at all. When a tank is moving they tend to cut away pretty quickly and/or choose less vegetation-dense locations.
   
3. At best, the sound engineering just felt adequate to me. The music is pretty unremarkable/unmemorable. I actually had to load the game up again today to recall if there was actual background music in the missions.
   
4. Based on the reviews, seems others may have liked the writing/story more, but I was uninterested and ended up skipping the, sometimes verbose feeling, text.
   
5. Grindy missions to get better tanks, unless you get DLC.
   
6. The AI is pretty basic. When encountering enemies there were times that I could see several tanks but they did not react or move until I shot at them individually. Other times it felt like they just added a ton of enemies to try and compensate and create a "challenge".
   
7. No updates since May 2023.
   
8. I also experienced getting awkwardly stuck on terrain in a couple locations that you would have expected to be able to traverse with no issue.(*)

Overall, the game just feels unfinished. I really wanted to like it, I was thrilled to find it and play a single player WoT game (we all want to get away from that toxicity right?). I wanted to give it up to the full refund window, but there is just not enough polish. Even at $15 I felt like I paid too much.

*Edit