I love how things work out sometimes, don't you? You're running behind on your blog schedule, you need to figure out some way to review more than 1 game in a day as efficiently as possible, you look on the game gallery and lo and behold, 2 top-down tank shooters right next to each other, just begging to be compared.
Let's get this show on the road.
Well, let's start off talking about TankU. It's a standard tank shooter. Nothing too extraordinary. There are 4 "cores" in the middle of the screen. Blue tanks will try to steal those cores and everything else will try to kill you. It's your job to make sure neither of those things happen. You're given full range of all the stages from the get-go, which I thought was just a clever way of disguising the fact that DigiPen students don't know how to program an autosave, but I was pleasantly surprised when I opened up the game for the second time and my upgrades were all saved.
And that leads me into the upgrade system. As you thrust yourself into battle, you gain experience, which you then spend on upgrades. Blah-di-blah, nothing unusual here. It's not a bad upgrade system, but I do have my gripes. First off, what use is a "bullet rate" upgrade in a game that does't limit the amount of bullets you can fire per second by just mashing the mouse button as opposed to holding it? Second, there's not a whole lot of variety and I didn't sense much of a difference with any particular upgrade. It won't take long before you've maxed everything out, and even then, you won't feel much more powerful.
So, all, in all, TankU is a decently made game with no particular hook...but at least it's playable!
Tank Wars is just a badly designed game. I'm sorry, I don't think there's any way around that. I try to be as nice as I can, but what do you expect me to say when literally the only sound effect in a war arena filled with tanks firing cannons all over the place is the sound of my tank's engine gently revving?
The principle mechanic in Tank Wars is that as you land hits on your enemies, you get money, which you can spend on weapon upgrades and such. I'll give you a second to think of the problem with that. Got it? Not too hard to figure out, right? It leads to a scenario wherein whoever scores the most points in the first minutes of the game gets a tremendous advantage when they can afford to buy all the best stuff.
Here's a parallel. Remember playing 1-on-1 basketball in the schoolyard? Remember that one friend who refused to play anything but "winner's rule?" No matter how many times you tell him that "loser's rule" makes the game more balanced by not throwing the game into an infinite loop wherein one person just keeps scoring, that friend wouldn't budge and you'd basically spend your recess watching him swish baskets for 40 minutes? That's this game in a nutshell.
This is exactly what happens when you don't take the time to examine your mechanics before you implement them. That's all I got for today. Until next time, stay canTANKerous...heh...I did it...
Links
How to Make a Tank Shooter: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26017
How Not to Make a Tank Shooter: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=516
