Panzar: First Impression (Beta UK/US)

This is another PvP game with action combat. It will be free to play and is currently in Beta for Europe, but also playable from the U.S. I was hoping there would be more games like this after playing Archeblade and Forge. As I suspected, they seem to be “coming out of the woodwork” now.

I’ve only played for about an hour and a half so far, but I liked the game so much I wanted to recommend at least trying it and telling you how it plays out and such. 

The first thing I noticed was the graphics.

They are really freakin’ impressive for a free to play title. I mean they’re seriously “AAA” quality in my opinion. It’s beautiful.

The combat is very simplistic, which makes it fun and easy to jump into.

Your left mouse button is your basic and very low damage attack. The right button performs a strong attack, which is slow and requires Energy to perform. Energy regens over time and is also drained while sprinting. Then you have special abilities you can use on the 1-0 buttons. Health potions, mana potions and energy potions are on the F1, F2, F3 keys respectively.

I played the Sapper class to start off; it just sounded neat. He can teleport, lay traps and put up a totem that buffs your teammates within its radius. The thing is, if you want to lay down a totem, you can’t lay traps–so it’s based on your play style and what you want to use at the time. To start off, I’m leveling up my trap ability. Oh, did I forget to mention you can level up your skills and make them more powerful?

You can also upgrade your weapons and armor through the Forge system, which is similar to crafting in your typical MMORPGs, but more simplistic. Although, I haven’t put a single second of time into the Forge so that’s just the impression I got from the tutorial.

The combat is chaotic! Which to me is a ton of fun. Being chaotic as it is would normally make it very hard to tell your enemies from your allies but these guys did something really cool to make it pretty obvious and helpful. The enemies have a flag behind their backs, your allies do not. It works very well and while the screen can still get very messy from so many players kickin’ butt all over it, I found it very easy to tell where I was and who I was attacking.

The maps I played so far were all objective-based.

I was happy about this because my favorite mode in mulitplayer games is where you capture and hold bases or flags. So, of course, the issue here will be you’re on a team of players that are just simply running around trying to get kills and not helping you actually win the game. The game is very much focused on the objective itself and working together to hold that point and kill your enemies! Basically, you won’t miss out on any awesome fun PvP action if you play the game properly, which is to go for the capture point. I mean the whole system is set up to bring all players into one spot for all out warfare.

The scoreboard at the end of the game only shows how much XP each player got.

I thought that was a little strange. I expected to see kills and deaths and such. Hopefully they’ll add a bit more statistics to the scoreboard. When I first saw that my initial reaction was “I’d like to see how I actually contributed.” But then you get another screen after the game is over and you exit the scoreboard showing you your own personal stats: how much damage you did, how many kills you got, how many times you died, and how much damage you took. It’s pretty neat.

There are several classes to choose from and they all seemed interesting but I haven’t played them yet. I read a few of their descriptions and it looked like there was a lot of variety in their styles, pretty neat.

If you’re in Europe or America go sign up, and I believe you get instant access just for signing up to the beta right now.

Main site/sign up at http://www.panzar.com/

Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/PanzarEU?fref=ts

I wouldn’t have made this long post about it if I wasn’t impressed. This game rocks! For a beta I didn’t even encounter any bugs, and after playing 3 different maps, the controls were solid and the game is just really damn polished up.