TankBlitz

Developer: Onur Vural and Leigh Christian | Publisher: Onur Vural | Release Date: 2017 | Genre: Action / Adventure / Indie | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

You’d have to be pretty desperate to trust an asylum patient named Johny Psycho with a billion-dollar prototype tank, but that’s just what the military does in TankBlitz. While they consider Johny somewhat delusional due to certain incidents, such as trying to take on a battleship with just his tank, he is still the most skilled tank commander they’ve ever had. The reason why the military is even considering letting Johny out of the asylum and near their expensive hardware is an extremist calling himself Hanibal. In addition to being wanted for crimes against humanity, Hannibal has also taken over a small island nation in the Pacific, where he is busy constructing a small army. As Johny, you are given control of a tank and sent out on your own to take down Hannibal by any means necessary.

TankBlitz is a game that clearly doesn’t take its story very seriously, but it does provide a rather humorous excuse to go on a rampage. Thankfully, it takes its action very seriously, so you can expect plenty of mayhem in the twelve levels, spread out over four chapters. Initially, you only have access to one tank, the Venom, but as you make progress, three additional ones become available. Each tank has its own strengths and weaknesses, but while they all have the same primary weapons, they all have different special upgrades. While twelve levels might not sound like much, you can replay each one as many times as you want, and there are three difficulty levels to choose from, which can be adjusted before starting a level. Selecting a higher difficulty rewards you with more cash and war-bonds, the two commodities used to upgrade your tanks in this game. You’ll definitely want to replay a few levels, as not only is it a lot of fun to return to earlier levels with a more powerful tank, but you’ll also need all the cash you can get to upgrade your vehicle fully.

TankBlitz is an arcade-style blaster viewed from a top-down perspective, so don’t expect anything resembling realism. Instead, you have 50 different types of enemies, all with a single purpose; turning your tank into a smoking pile of scrap. Along the way, you’ll also encounter a few bosses who will try to stop you dead in your tracks. However, after a few upgrades, your enemies won’t know what hit them as you turn your tank into a nimble, bullet and missile-spewing weapon of mass destruction.

Visually TankBlitz reminds us of early arcade games and also brought back some fond memories of the Sensible Software classic, Cannon Fodder. Unfortunately, when played on a large, high-resolution monitor, the graphics tend to become a little fuzzy. The game only provides the option to play windowed or in fullscreen, so there appears to be no way to adjust the resolution manually. You can also choose between low, medium, and high graphics or allow the game to auto-adjust the graphics quality for optimal performance.

Tucked away behind the “advanced settings” menu is the option to tweak anti-aliasing particles and enable features such as dynamic shadows, persistent debris, track marks, and screen shake. Maxing out everything does make the game look better, but it won’t be enough to impress gamers expecting cutting-edge visuals. A closer look does reveal lots of neat touches, though, such as enemy soldiers going down in puddles of blood, buildings getting blown to bits, and some great enemy vehicle designs. The character designs used for the comic book style cut-scenes are also quite nice, and while not exactly state of the art, the visuals definitely have charm.

It’s rather hard to judge the game’s soundtrack as there is usually so much gunfire and explosions happening at all times that the music is lost in the noise. This is not necessarily bad for an action-packed game like TankBlitz, and the audio levels can be adjusted by players who prefer to tone down the sound effects in favor of the music. It is a pity that the game doesn’t feature any speech, as at some points during missions, characters will pop up with things to say, but usually, there is too much shooting going on to read what it is. The controls are straightforward, with WASD taking care of your tank movement while the mouse is used for aiming and shooting. Using the scroll wheel, you can switch between your four weapons on the fly, and the keyboard activates special abilities. While the game’s pace is frantic, you can’t just hold down the fire button and blow up everything in your path, either. Firstly, your weapons all have limited ammunition, and secondly, each of your primary weapons requires you to pay attention to how you use them. The longer you fire the machine gun, the faster it shoots, but without a break to cool down, it will overheat and briefly jam. Conversely, the cannon has to be manually reloaded after a few shots, which requires you to hit the fire button at just the right time. Failure results in the cannon briefly jamming, while success rewards you with a supercharged shot. Even the mortar requires you to keep an eye on a small indicator to land your shots successfully. It can be tricky to keep track of all this in the heat of battle, but it becomes second nature with time.

Completing missions and destroying enemies rewards you with cash, which can be spent on the many upgrades available for each of your tanks. These range from boosting your primary weapons to other aspects, such as health, engines, tracks, armor, targeting, and more. Unfortunately, not everything can be bought with cash, as some upgrades require war bonds. These are only earned by successfully fulfilling specific criteria, like completing a mission on a more challenging difficulty level or earning achievements. The good news is that ordinary cash can be exchanged for war bonds at a rate of $10k for ten war bonds, so you won’t have to grind too much to get the upgrades you want. Speaking of upgrades, each tank has some unique ones that ensure you’ll want to take them all for a spin. So, while the Venom only has heat-seeking missiles and extra starting ammo as upgrade options, the other tanks get much more interesting. Take the Tempest, which can be upgraded to self-repair while shooting, or replace the bullets in your minigun with lasers that don’t consume any ammo as long as your shields are intact. Then there is the Mammoth, which can be equipped with nuclear missiles, and the Zenith, which has space for its own Tesla tower! Thanks to these upgrades, we kept playing the game long after defeating the final boss and continued to have a blast returning to earlier levels and conquering them on higher difficulty settings.

At the end of the day, TankBlitz is not the longest or best-looking game in the genre, but there’s no denying the sheer entertainment it offers. We would have loved to see a few more levels or some sort of randomization to make returning to previous levels a little less predictable, but despite this, the game is still a lot of fun. It is definitely one of those titles that are easy to pick up and play, but once you are hooked, there’s no stopping until you’ve aced every level and fully upgraded every tank.