This is war son….. get out there and blast the enemy with your…..Magic Beans?
Most of us have seen some sort of tank battle game, and Pocket Tanks has been around for a long time. It’s available on Mac and PC and finally it comes to the iphone/touch. This is as close as it gets to the PC version, and I paid for that version years ago and loved it. Disclaimer: I’m using a free copy from Blitwise for this review.
This version is pretty much a smaller version of the PC game, with the free version you get 35 weapons from a simple one shot to napalm and a laser gun. Moving up to the full version gets you another 70 weapons including nukes and a rail gun. There are no defenses unless you use a weapon like dirt to cover yourself until it gets blown off by enemy fire. Dirt is also good to cover the enemy since many weapons shot from under dirt will damage the shooter. At the start you can set the music and effects on or off then go to options. Adjust music and sound effects volume, and under game settings there are many choices that change how the game plays, such as the terrain type, explosion size, wind speed and more. A nice option is weapon selection, where you decide what weapons are available later, when you choose your weapons from a list of randomly selected choices. I turn off a few of the weapons I don’t really like but you may have your own tastes so this means you don’t get something you don’t want. Next you choose 1 or 2 player on the same device,(sorry no wi-fi play), or practice, where you control both tanks and have unlimited ammo and all weapons. Practice is great to explore the way each weapon reacts on the different terrain types, like flats, hills, and valleys. In one or two player you choose tank colors, player names, and difficulty level. Then your taken to the weapon shop and a scrolling list of 20 weapons randomly picked by the game. Take turns choosing or hit the random button and the game picks for you. You get 10 shots in turn and 4 chances to move if your on relatively smooth ground. There is no saving games, and if you quit mid game you start over. The game is short enough that you wont care much about saves and your score isn’t saved either so nobody will know if you suck. The interface is a combo of on screen buttons and slides to adjust angle of gun and power of each shot, but the angle can be set by dragging your finger on the screen to aim.
The ground is destructible…(is that a word?)…so you can use it to your advantage by blasting the enemy into a pit with a jackhammer, then filling it full of napalm..MMmmm MMmmm Bar-B-Q.
I give Pocket Tanks 5
out of 5 Bulls-eyes.
Price: free
Price: $4.99 Deluxe
“I love the smell of pretend napalm on the ipod”
