Tanks inhabit a special place in the minds of small boys and tough schoolyard girls far and wide. One of the most deadly killing machines known to man, tanks are mobile steel fortresses capable of rumbling across nearly any terrain, decimating buildings and rolling straight over its adversaries. Who wouldn’t want a tank parked next to their sports car or monster truck?
On top of this death machine rests a massive 120mm cannon designed to create doodie stains on whatever is caught between its sights. They plow through fields, deserts and city streets with 1500 horsepower of diesel-guzzling power.
Except, what’s this? Oh no! Your treads have disappeared! Blown off by enemy rockets? Disintegrated with a toxic acid? Eaten by tread-munching vermin? Who knows? But it’s time to do battle!
Tank Strike pits tanks against each other in a digital 2D battle royal. The game is ostensibly a remake of a number of PC games from the early 90’s, Desert Tank Wars being the one most familiar to me. The story is like that of any great Shakespearean tragedy: a bunch of tanks take turns blowing holes in each other until the battlefield is littered with scraps and only one remains functional.
The shooting is pretty simple. Hit left and right to change the angle and up and down to adjust the power of the shot. Gusts of wind show up to wreck havoc on shots, but the game is easy enough that I was able to teach my guinea pig how to play. The game is spiced up a bit with different types of guns which can be purchased in the beginning of the round such as a spread shot and a larger burst. Sadly, there are no descriptions of what most of the types do and so you can only figure it out through trial and error. How was I to know that my “dagger shot” was going to somehow bounce off the walls and phase through the ground en route to eventually hitting my own tank?
When I was far smaller, my friends and I used to sit in my basement and play this game for hours on my blazing 286 PC. We tossed about juvenile insults that make today’s trash-talking Xbox Live pre-teens look like regular urbane gentlemen. Threats such as “Now you’re mine” and “I’m going to blow you to pieces” caused panic attacks. The unfortunate downside to such nostalgia is it tends to obfuscate glaring faults. Most importantly, why can’t the tanks move? These alleged vehicles are glued to their randomly assigned starting positions and are completely immobile.
The lack of mobility has a huge impact on the game since your location on the map plays such a strategic role. Some players will naturally have an advantage if their position is on top of a hill in the corner of the map; other players will be out in the open, a lone sheep grazing in the meadows surrounded by wolves, crocodiles and sheep-eating tanks.
The game can feel slow when playing against the computer, especially given their habit of firing shots into the clouds that seem to take forever before landing directly on target. Like any game of its ilk, it feels a lot better with more people in the room so you can feel the tension when someone is aiming at your tank or when you blow someone up. The self-destructive blasts become more comical and the drama elevated.
On the plus side, you can make the tanks look like squids. Although squids are the natural rival to the octopus in the media spotlight on 8-legged sea creatures, I can still squint my eyes and pretend.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game; it feels almost identical to the one I remember so fondly. It’s just hard to recommend it considering how many games are out there that look a lot nicer and bring so much more to the table. Worms takes the core concept and adds humor, a larger arsenal, and squad-based approach. Gunbound, a free PC game, adds different types of units, online play, items and a monetary system which adds a feeling of importance to matches. Both games allow players to move.
For a dollar, it is difficult to dismiss Tank Strike as a waste of money. If you have people around to play it with, the game can be a lot of fun. If you mostly roll solo, you should probably aim elsewhere.
Visit the Xbox Live Marketplace to download a free demo of Tank Strike.
Tank Strike was purchased from the Xbox Indie Marketplace for 80 MS points ($1) and this review is based on the full version of the game.
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