TankTigers

The point of a tank is that it can get to places that other vehicles presumably can't get to, either because they can't cross the inhospitable terrain or because they'd get blown up along the way.

So the notion that a tank is a lumbering, awkward machine that crawls along roads in crumbling eastern European cities is something of a fallacy, and not the best notion on which to base a game. TigerTanks, however, disagrees.

At least the initial rollout is good. With World War II as its stage, the game presents a beautiful 3D globe interface for choosing which particular arena you'd like to do battle in.

These arenas are important locations from the war and you're given bits of information such as the year and weather conditions in which that particular battle took place. This suggests that a wintry tank fight in Ardennes would be considerably different to an assault on Berlin in the spring.

Unfortunately, these potentially important factors go completely ignored: location is purely superficial. That's not to say the locations all look the same - indeed, they're quite diverse - but the whole game plays out on a small, square arena dotted with buildings and the occasional obstacle. Otherwise, each level is the same as the next.

A game like this doesn't have to provide a realistic representation of tank, but TigerTanks seems to deliberately handicap your war machines in an effort to add a bit of extra challenge to the game.

The controls would be pretty good, though for some reason developer Rusty Raven has decided that a tank can't move while turning. If you want to rotate your tank, you have to stop, and this drags the pace of the game to a snail's crawl.

You can rotate the turret while moving, which is something, but the lack of elevation controls on the gun barrel means you can only shoot a set maximum distance. If an enemy tank is in front of you and close enough, destroying it is a simple and unsatisfying point and click.

Adjusting for an opponent farther out, however, is altogether impossible. The ability to change the cannon's trajectory along with its direction would have benefited TigerTanks greatly.

Graphically, the tanks themselves look okay (if a little stubby and caricatured) but the environments and visual effects are dreadful. This game would have looked okay as an App Store launch title, but a year and a half later it's severely outdated.

Enemy tanks simply spawn out of nowhere, which shatters the illusion of urban warfare, while the polygonal explosion effects look like a paper hat falling out of a Christmas cracker (only without the bang).

And this isn't a game that can be salvaged with multiplayer. The local Bluetooth and wi-fi hook-up is no more exciting than facing down the brainless CPU controlled tanks, given the severely restrictive nature of the gameplay. Maybe a 16 player game would improve matters, but good luck finding that many friends to play with.

All this might sound a little harsh, but it feels as though Rusty Raven couldn't be bothered (or wasn't able) to properly develop the game's design beyond an ultra-basic and uninspiring shooter that would have struggled to impress a decade ago.