N-Philes

When Tank Beat first introduces itself to you it can give off some mixed impressions. At first, it sounds decent enough: moving tanks around battlefields and blowing the snot out of things. Tanks and videogames have always been a nice combination. Then you look at it. Man, it is not a pretty sight. The chunky, bland landscapes and blocky tanks simply look awful, even on the underpowered Nintendo DS. If you look a little deeper, though, you'll find that the game is controlled entirely through the use of the touch-screen and is created by Milestone, the developers behind the GameCube/Dreamcast shooter Chaos Field and the upcoming Radio Allergy. The developer's history helped some of the bigger media outlets get past the visuals and enjoy the gameplay; whether or not the game is good enough for you is something you get to find out when you actually play it.

Tank Beat tosses you into the boots of Vill Katjue, a newbie tank commander who is separated from his officers when a neighboring country decides to invade his homeland. Unsure of what actions to take exactly, Vill can think of only one thing to do: seek out and rescue his family. The story unfolds via text boxes in between battles and the game tries to make things interesting with the relationships between your officers and the opposing ones, but the writing is mostly dry and uninteresting. A lot of names and characters look to be thrown at you throughout the course of the game. Most of them won't stick.

At its core, Tank Beat is like a real-time strategy game in which you only have direct control over one unit. After you play a few missions you'll also gain cursory control over an allied tank. The top screen displays everything that's happening on the battle field in 3D, but the radar screen on the bottom is what you'll be spending most of your time looking at. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since Tank Beat is not a very pretty game to look at. The blue dot on the screen represents your tank, while the green and red dots signify your allies and enemies respectively. Moving your tank around the field is as simple as touching the dot and drawing a line in the direction you want to move in, while touching the screen itself and dragging the stylus around will move the camera around the tank on the top screen. Other options on the radar screen include the ability to give your allied tank general commands, such as actively seeking out enemy vehicles and attacking, following you around for support, or defending a spot on the map.

When you move into firing range of an enemy, you can enter attack mode by holding down the L button and fire away by tapping the enemy dots on the radar screen. Obviously, hitting sitting tanks is a very easy thing to do, so those feisty invaders decide to mix things up by moving around. Depending on what kind of tank you're using, there are different weapons you can take advantage of. If you're using a machine gun you can still get by with just tapping away at the dots and blanketing them with fire, but larger tanks with cannons will have to anticipate enemy movements in order to get a good hit.

Tanks themselves are ranked in four categories: power, defense, speed, and range. These are self-explanatory for the most part, and tanks range from small vehicles that can run circles around opponents to achingly slow monsters that are forced to stop dead in their tracks in order to fire their cannons. Some tanks also have advantages in other areas, such as one that can move across water easily and others designed for close combat.

Interestingly enough, you may not even get to see some of these tanks during your play through the game. Some missions require you to save a certain amount of tanks from being destroyed, and depending on how well you do you can gain more tank models to use and even branch off into different levels. Tank Beat has a nice amount of missions for players to go through at 24, but I doubt it'll take more than three or four hours to play through all of them, leaving you with the Skirmish and Battle modes. Skirmish gives you the chance to play through all of the story mode's missions again for better scores, and there's a bonus of a few new stages. The more appealing mode, obviously, is the multiplayer.

Tank Beat is compatible with Nintendo's Wi-Fi connection and supports up to four players simultaneously in a basic death match game, but unfortunately it's looking a little thin. There are no team options, though there's nothing to stop players from cooperating, and only three maps will be available for play online (there are many more maps to play on over local wireless). Two player matches over Wi-Fi are pretty slow-paced with two tanks covering some large areas, but I can see how having a couple more people playing would intensify things quite a bit. Whether or not it's interesting enough to warrant long-term play seems questionable, if not unlikely.

Ultimately, Tank Beat is shaping up to be simple, easy-to-understand fun that could be interesting enough to see through to the end, but at a few hours long I've got to wonder if there's going to be anything else to it to warrant sticking around longer. The limited online multiplayer is definitely disappointing, since more maps would extend the simplistic gameplay's life a lot. Tank Beat has been jumping around its release schedule a bit, originally shipping in March, but it is supposed to be hitting stores this Spring. Stay tuned to see how it all comes together in the final build.