BattleTanx

Review

by Brad Cook

BattleTanx is a good game, but its lack of options and game play glitches hold it back from being great.

Tank games are nothing new, and neither is BattleTanx' Road Warrior-esque futuristic setting, but that's not a big deal. Even the horribly overused save-your-kidnapped-girlfriend story doesn't bother me too much since it only loosely serves to connect the fifteen levels. It has a wafer-thin plot which is more like a series of unconnected events designed to kill time until you find your girlfriend. It's a shame that storytelling in video games is still so weak, but I think all gamers keep their expectations low in that area. I would have preferred the addition of clues to collect or a mystery to solve along the way, but I'll take a good old-fashioned shoot-'em-up too.

My biggest gripes, though, lie with the drawbacks I mentioned in the beginning. In the area of options, while there are difficulty settings and you can play the various episodes out of order in Battle Mode, you're locked in more while playing in Story Mode. Unlike in Battle Mode, you can't choose which tank you want to use before each mission; it's preselected for you. If it was up to me, I'd select the lumbering Goliath every time. The quicker tanks aren't fast enough to make a difference in the speed category, and they're so lightly armored and have such weak weapons that you'll find yourself dying quite a bit since most of the battles are face-to-face.

I also didn't like how you can't choose between your default weapon and the better ones. If you pick up a power-up, such as the nuclear one, you have to use it the next time you fire. You can't hold it for later use, which defeats the purpose of collecting power-ups as far as I'm concerned. I also found the invisibility one useless since you can't see your tank unless you fire, and if you fire the other tanks will be able to see you and start shooting. How can you steer what you can't see? Would it have been that hard to put the outline of your tank on the screen so that at least you know where you're going?

BattleTanx would have benefited greatly from a two-player option too. Who wouldn't love to battle a pal over a Link Cable? Once you've defeated a game like this, its long-term replay value lies in being able to duke it out with your buddies, who are sure to be better opponents than the single-minded computer-controlled tanks.

In the area of game play glitches, I found maneuvering around the landscape to be harder than it should be. For example, the roofs of buildings stick up into the streets because they're shown at an angle to convey a sense of depth. This is fine, but it's annoying when you discover yourself unable to drive behind them even though they're obviously not on the ground. Such is life in a 2D world if you try to mimic a 3D feel, I suppose, but it's still irritating.

The other glitch which bugged me was the fact that you can't destroy all of the landscape. You can blow up some of the buildings, but not all of them, and the destructible ones only blow up when shown with your default weapon, not a power-up. Similarly, you can run over trees but shrubs and slight inclines in the terrain get in you way. Aren't tanks supposed to be able to rumble over and through just about anything? I realize that the developers wanted the levels to be more like mazes, but they should have figured out a way to do that without sacrificing believability.

Overall, though, BattleTanx isn't a bad game, and it's still fun despite my nitpicks. It's a good on-the-go game which you can pull out to complete another level in Story Mode or go for a little action in Battle Mode. I just wouldn't expect it to hold a lot of long-term play value.