Panzer Corps 2: Frontlines – Westwall Review: A Glorified Meat Grinder Masquerading as Strategy

Hello everyone, let’s take off the rose-tinted glasses and dive headfirst into the things publishers love to pretend are revolutionary, when in fact they’re just another rinse-and-repeat DLC slab slapped onto your digital storefront. Today’s offender is Panzer Corps 2: Frontlines – Westwall, arriving on 19th August 2025, presumably because they wanted to make sure you had exactly enough time to forget whether the last expansion was tolerable. This one straps you into the driver’s seat of the U.S. Army, as you bash your poor pixelated soldiers against the Siegfried Line-because apparently, nothing screams exciting gameplay like hitting your head against concrete bunkers repeatedly until someone finally collapses. Spoiler: It’s usually you.

The Campaign: From lightning speed to slogging in mud

The campaign spans September through December 1944, because gamers don’t deserve to see any sunshine or fun apparently-only endless forests, mines, and enemies entrenched like barnacles on an oil rig. After the collapse of the Germans in the Falaise Pocket and the liberation of Paris, you’re promised a quick dash to the border. That lasts about five seconds before the game decides to throttle your enthusiasm by dragging you through the world’s most depressing corridor between Maastricht and Aachen. Imagine sprinting forward in a shooter only to be hit with a cutscene reminding you that, “actually, this is going to be trench warfare for the next 30 hours.” Yes, nothing says entertainment like turning a power fantasy into a bureaucratic exercise in attrition.

Oh, and then it gets worse. The Huertgen Forest stage shows up-because if you weren’t bored enough fighting human-shaped blobs of AI behind sandbags, now you get to add trees into the mix. Wonderful. From there, it’s the Roer Plains and Saar region, which is basically another way of saying, “Congratulations, you’ve unlocked more brown terrain to stare at!”

Features: The marketing brochure vs. reality

The store page bullets are written in that corporate lethal-positivity style. You’re told to expect “historic battles never before featured in Panzer Corps content.” Translation: You’re about to play through yet another set of slightly rearranged missions with the same formulaic objectives, except this time it’s snowing or there’s a bunker that looks a little different. Groundbreaking stuff.

• Dynamic difficulty curve: Oh joy, it starts easy then gets impossibly hard. How exciting. It’s like inviting you into the waiting room with a free lollipop, only to stab you with the medical bill. Yes, I’m a doctor, don’t worry-I can confirm the prognosis is terminal frustration.
• Open assaults, urban combat, and forest fighting: Translation: padded mission variety where 90% of the game is still you slowly grinding tanks against bunkers while pretending to be a genius strategist. Honestly, this is less chess and more whack-a-mole with Panzerfausts.
• Custom officer portraits and campaign maps: Because when I’m being gunned down by Nazi pillboxes for the twentieth time, what I really need is a fancier JPEG of some officer wagging their pencil moustache at me.

New Units: Because gimmicks fix everything

Now, here’s where it gets hilarious. The “new equipment” list highlights such revolutionary additions as Sherman tanks with random junk bolted to the sides-sandbags, spare track links, random planks. Basically DIY armor. Yes, the game makes a point of saying they’re “rare” and “special.” Nothing spices up your tactical experience quite like being handed a glorified farmyard project car masquerading as military hardware.

• Dragon’s Teeth: Anti-tank concrete lumps. Riveting gameplay feature-your tank sits there and twiddles its tracks until the concrete politely melts.
• Pillboxes: Yes, they exist. They were boring in real life, and they’re boring here. Put ten together, suddenly you’ve invented a bullet sponge simulator.
• Dodge WC-63 Truck: Fancy way of saying “cheap taxi service for infantry.” Nothing screams immersion like loading dudes in and out of budget Uber trucks on repeat.
• Enhanced US Air Units: Basically a re-color of your normal planes with a stat boost. Truly the stuff of innovation.

The Scenario List: Fourteen shades of déjà vu

There are 14 scenarios, and if you somehow make it through all of them without suffering flashbacks to paint drying, congratulations, you’ve officially ascended to sainthood. They love to slap names like “Huertgen Forest” and “Metz” on them to sell the illusion of variety, but make no mistake: You’ll still be rolling tanks across the same tile grids, capturing hexes that look identical, while listening to droning briefings delivered with all the enthusiasm of a hungover history professor.

System Requirements: False sense of security

Now, the game proudly declares you only need a dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM. Which sounds reasonable until you remember that half the animations in Panzer Corps 2 are smoother than a toddler drawing with crayons. The Steam note reminds you Windows 7 is not supported, probably because if you’re still on Windows 7, you clearly have better things to do than spend your remaining years staring at hex grids.

Conspiracy Corner: Why does this exist?

There’s always that nagging doubt with DLC like this. Why release it? Why now? Could it be that big publishers know you can’t resist adding “just one more” chunk of campaign so your save file feels “complete”? Or maybe, just maybe, Westwall exists because re-skinning terrain, creating a dozen scenarios, and slapping “new Sherman variant” into the mix takes about a quarter of the dev time of making something genuinely new. But hey, who cares when the cash cow is still mooing?

Final Diagnosis: Worth breaching or worth skipping?

If you’re a diehard Panzer Corps fan, the kind of person who sharpens pencils before every hex-based move and considers calculating artillery range the height of weekend entertainment, then yes, you’ll probably throw your money at this willingly. For the rest of us? It’s DLC mediocrity. A new coat of historical paint slapped across a familiar, aging skeleton. Like a patient dressed up for surgery who’s still suffering from the same chronic condition underneath.

Overall impression? Bad. Not catastrophic, not “burn it with fire” terrible-but bad in that frustrating, cynical way where you realize developers know exactly how little they have to do to keep your cash flowing. The Westwall may have been impenetrable to armies in 1944, but the paywall in 2025? Oh, that comes down in seconds flat for the player base.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Article source: Panzer Corps 2: Frontlines – Westwall