GamesRelay

Name: NormalTanks

NormalTanks is an arcade-style top-down shooter that puts you in the driver’s seat of a well-equipped tank as you attempt to destroy an invading alien menace. Originally a PC title, it has recently been released as a PSP Mini, and is now available from the Playstation Network.

The mechanics of the game are simple enough – you pass through eight treacherous levels of enemies, blasting anything that happens to trundle in your way. Movement is allocated to the D-Pad, with turret rotation kept to facing the direction you press on the face buttons. This setup can feel a bit strange at first, and aiming can seem particularly awkward. By tapping one of the face buttons, the turret will move at a 45 degree angle, while holding it will move completely in that direction. Nonetheless, with some practice, it becomes more manageable, though fast-moving enemies can be difficult to keep up with.

The tank is only equipped with two weapons – a shell-firing tank gun, and a bullet-crunching machinegun. While ammo is limited, you won’t have any fear of running short, with hundreds of shells and thousands of rounds littered about the game casually. The tank gun is easily the most effective, capable of taking most moving enemies in one shot, and tears down stationary emplacements in little time. In fact, there’s hardly a reason to use the machinegun at all, if it weren’t for the fast-moving opponents that are almost impossible to hit consistently with shells. The aiming controls are little help in this situation, either, making the large number of stationary enemies a blessing.

It is possible to upgrade the weapons as you’re playing, by rolling over red stars dropped by wrecked foes. These can change your weapons almost beyond recognition, with the tank gun moving from a slow, single shot behemoth, to a three-round blast with the force to knock your steel fortress backwards. Further upgrades improve your tank-shielding, which is highly useful against later bosses in the game. It doesn’t treat you kindly – it’s a really challenging experience, particularly from the variety of well-realised boss battles. While most simply involve hitting them until they die, or hitting a particular spot until it explodes, the enemy attack patterns are highly variable. Death is punished by the loss of a life, of which there are only a finite amount, dropped by the same enemies every time you run through it. When you meet your unpleasant end, the game uses a life to drop down another tank exactly where you died. The shame in this is that all the upgrades you picked up along the way are stripped from you, and you must go back to dealing with powerful bosses with very poor equipment – meaning that you’ll probably just die again. When you run out of lives, it simply restarts the level, giving you a quantity of three lives to pass you by.

The level design contains quite a lot of variety, as new types of obstacles make regular appearances as you travel through. While you may be required to destroy some rocks blocking your path to proceed, you may be dodging airborne bombs next, to even performing acts of sabotage by controlling robotic beetles to destroy force fields blocking your way. You’re always seeing something new, even if you finish the entire thing in less than an hour.

Thankfully, there are multiple difficulty modes to slog through. Normal, even early on, presents an enormous challenge. Bosses can wear your tank down very quickly if not dealt with quickly and efficiently, and even your common foe can overwhelm you if unchecked. Hard is enough to make you gawk at the screen in confusion. With only three hits until you become a burnt-out husk, this is only for masochists.

NormalTanks won’t startle anyone in the graphics department, even for a Mini. They’re quite bland and uninteresting, aside from dynamic shadows, which look out of place amongst the simple 2D textures. The music carries a beat, but it won’t last in anyone’s memory. Sound effects are tinny and sometimes simply annoying, particularly when bombs are falling from the sky, with an uncompromising wailing screech, which is compounded by multiple explosives falling at once, creating a hellish cacophony of sound, though this is only in one sequence.

Overall, NormalTanks is a very capable Mini that lives up to all the tenants that a fine Mini should live up to. The gameplay keeps showing diversity and the heady challenge should find an eager audience willing to fight their way through it. While it has its minor irritations, and a very punishing life system, it remains a very enjoyable and recommendable title.