Welcome to the DayZ Panthera Review! It seems like every week another new map is being released by the DayZ community, I have spent the past few weeks covering each new map as it is released and have continued to do so as more pop up. The first map I tried was DayZ Utes - a PvP focused map, then I tried the tropical Lingor Island. My adventure then diverted me to the scorching desert of Takistan, before hitting the city streets of Fallujah - a massive city map based on the real location.
The journey is only just getting started though, with my survivor pushed out of the camp and in to yet another strange and unfamiliar location. Another map inspired by a real location, Panthera Island is based on the Gorenjska region in Slovenia. While the real location isn't actually an island, Panthera utilizes satellite imagery and road maps to recreate the area to the best of its ability - with only a few fictional areas added in for extra detail.
This 10x10km map is the same size as Lingor Island, although far less tropical - Panthera Island is a mountainous region filled with pine tree forests and over 60 small mountain villages. Panthera feels like Chernarus in Spring, with a lot more mountains and rivers running through it. The topography of the island makes for some interesting adventures, but the key feature is that every building on the entire island is enterable, besides a few small exceptions that really have no impact and often will go unnoticed.
It's not hard to say that it didn't take me long to fall in love with this map, and it's easy to see why it's one of the highest quality maps available for ArmA 2. Although the region has been scaled down to about a quarter of it's real-life counter-parts size, and a lot of the major towns scaled down to small villages - the whole map comes together to create an island that feels real. Everything makes sense, and it's easy to lose track of the hours.
From venturing through one of over 60 villages, to running along one of the many streams - the island never gets boring, and explorers will have a field day. With all the buildings being enterable, you can really invest some time in a village with some pre-planning on how you will cover the most ground as possible. Loot is spread out across the entire village and is much less condensed than on other maps, making looting a much more interesting activity.
As you can imagine, there's plenty of residential loot available. But much like Lingor Island, military spawns and airfields are quite common - with several across the island itself. Throughout the mountains, players can expect to find crashed helicopter spawns - which successfully made it's way across in the port. One of the problems it has inherited however is the barracks which have small doorways, making them difficult to enter if they don't have a larger side door. Most of the time a little wiggling will fix this though.
With so many interesting locations to visit, new opportunities for bases and a map filled with plenty of ambush chokepoints - DayZ Panthera has taken a top spot in my picks for favourite maps, joining Fallujah and replacing Chernarus. I will be spending a lot more time on this map, exploring its hidden villages and unique locations - it's definitely a map you shouldn't miss. To find out how to play DayZ Panthera, find out the server details and required addons below.
To play DayZ Panthera, I recommend using DayZ Commander to keep the map up-to-date and to easily find servers to play on. For more information about DayZ, visit our game page.
