Panzer Corps Grand Campaign '42-'43 DLC

Fun

If you remember some of my first reviews for this game one of the first campaings I did was the Grand Campaing itself where you start off in 1939 as the Germans and from there you fight with your army until 1945. Even though the Grand Campaing starts off in 1939 after some time it diverges into 2 different campaings Grand Campaing West and Grand Campaing East. While East has a single DLC for every year West only has 3 DLCs. 1942 and 43 have been conbined into a single campaing, 1944 West and 1945 West. +This DLC is essentially the exact opposite of Eastern Front. Instead of being on the offensive with a few defensive missions here and there and eventually going full defensive in here you're defensive from the very beginning. Its a great change of pace. +The first few missions are very interesting you're defending against British raids and as the campaing goes on you eventually find yourself fighting in Sicily for a little bit before evacuating the island and you start fighting on the Italian mainland. Defensive from beginning to end, like I said fun change of pace. +The progression towards mid and late war equipment is REALLY fast here. After all it is 2 years combined into a single DLC so I suppose its natural. You start off with the usual Panzer 3 and 4s and before you know it you have Panthers and Tigers available to you. +In the past DLCs not in every mission but in some missions in the debriefing you'd get like an editors note type of thing in which they'd talk about what happened IRL. For example lets say you're in the East, you captured Moscow at the end of the mission in the debrief it'll say like "in real life the Germans had to stop before reaching Moscow and eventually even fall back" bla bla you get it. It wouldn't happen every mission, it happened rarely but it was fun to see. In here especially with the British raids in the first half of the DLC it happens a lot more often and it is a lot of fun to read about it. +/- As usual I'm playing on the easiest difficulty available because I do not want to save scum, waste hours trying to do a single mission over and over again, tear my hair out and cry when I realize 8 missions into a campaing that I have to restart because failing some previous missions cost me a lot that I cannot win any battles anymore. Thats why I play on the easiest difficulty and admittedly it is at times WAY too easy... Not here. Is it hard? No. Its the easiest difficulty still, a bit of thinking and you can easily get through the missions but its certainly harder then some other DLCs. In here I was almost always low on prestige, unable to fully upgrade and sometimes even unable to reinforce my own units. There were a lot of times where I felt like the amount of troops I could bring into a battle was simply not enough. Thank god I was on the easiest difficulty but still... On one hand I liked it because some other DLCs essentially turned into "point and click and everything dies" because of the difficulty but in here there were times where I had to actually stop and think before doing something. As with 99% of this game if I was not playing on the easiest difficulty I would be rolling on the ground and crying. -There is still scripted events and sometimes a message will pop up while you're in the mission giving you a heads up about certain things. Unfortunately this can make the game crash. -Just like some other DLCs enemy units can spawn out of thin air, on the edges of the map. This happens to both air units and to ground units. Essentially the game is saying "I said you'll be on the defensive, you didn't listen to me and now your units are encircled because I decided to spawn an entire new wave of enemies to attack you out of thin air. Fuck you." Its a fun DLC. Being (at times literally thanks to enemies spawning out of thin air) unable to attack, having to be defensive and plan accordingly, defeating the British raids then moving onto defeating Allied advances in Italy... Its enjoyable. A bit harder then the rest of the DLCs in my opinion but the entire game is kinda like that, play on easy if you do not want to die.