Death Tank

There used to be a game on, I think, the BBC Micro which I used to play at school with some friends. You had a landscape upon which two tanks were placed. You then typed in a speed and an angle and tried to blow your friends to kingdom-come. When I was in secondary school I remember a similar game involving gorillas throwing exploding bananas.

Now, as I enjoy my 30s, another version of it turns up. Death Tank is a game which gives you a landscape and deposits 4 tanks onto it. Then you try to blow each other to smithreens. The only really difference between this and the game of my history is that you can move your tank (very slowly) left and right to avoid the incoming attacks.

Graphically the game is quite impressive. The landscapes are well presented but are, essentially a randomly hilly bit of texturing. They don’t have the same sort of charm as, say, the landscapes in Worms as they are devoid of any features other than the undulations of the hills but they are nice to look at, and they deform quite impressively when you shoot them a little bit. The explosions are also quite well realised, which you will notice as you are repeatedly slammed by even the beginner AI tanks.

The control system lets the game down, in my opinion. The angle and power of your shots is determined solely by the left stick – move the stick up and down determines the power and right-left determines the strength. I guarantee that you will forget this control scheme while playing, usually when you’re about to make the final kill shot and you just need to tweak the power. You’ll want power, but you’ll change the angle instead – usually quite dramatically – and then end up having to fire off a few range shots to get the angle back. You’re usually dead by the end of this. The right stick allows you to change weapons – you start with standard cannons, but can upgrade from the inter-level shops to nukes, multiple warheads and machine guns. For the most part, these are pretty redundant as it’s mainly the cannon you’ll be using – occasionally the nuke is fun just to see the pretty bang it makes.

Moving the tank using the left and right triggers is the most boring thing you will ever do. It’s so slow. You can buy speed upgrades, but these are quite short lived and you’ll be back to the ridiculously slow crawl before you know it. You can also purchase jump jets allowing you to fly your tank across the map, although I’m not quite sure why you’d actually want to.