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Tank Battle: East Front 1943

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Tank Battle: East Front 1943

Many of you will have seen this soul-crushing guide on monetising free games by designing a rubbish title then endlessly re-skinning and re-releasing it.

Well that's kind of what Hunted Cow has been doing with its series of light historical strategy games, all based on near-identical iterations of the same engine. Except these games aren't free, and they're actually reasonably entertaining in the first instance.

But given that Tank Battle 1943 is something like the ninth outing for the series, that entertainment value has been stretched pretty thinly.

For those new to the series, these are hex-based games whereby you move units around attempting to either destroy the enemy or take objective hexes or a mixture of both.

Different units have different movement and attack statistics, but the big differentiator is usually unit type. Anti-tank guns are good against tanks, for instance, but not so much against infantry.

Each unit you command has a rating between one and ten that determines how hard it hits, and which gradually degrades as it takes damage until destruction. There's some simple terrain effects and most games, including this one, come with a tutorial campaign and two more involved campaigns to play through.

It's a solid light strategy engine - especially when you include some of the later improvements, all present in this version, such as flank attacks.

Part of the problem is that it's simply too generic. When you've got a set of mechanics that the designer thinks can translate across eras of warfare as different as Ancient Greece, through to the American Civil War and now to World War 2, you know it can't really have a lot of realism and depth.


Ring a ring o' tanks

So while there are some new units on display here, you hardly even notice because they're so poorly differentiated from one another, except by slightly different graphics. Under the bonnet, the game can give you different numbers against movement and firepower, but you just don't often notice it on the battlefield.

The predecessor to this title, Tank Battle 1942, was the game in the series I've enjoyed the most, simply because it had the most interesting maps and scenarios. It's a good demonstration of how a talented designer can make the most of a straightforward set of mechanics by deploying them in different ways.

Sadly, Tank Battle 1943 doesn't seem to have taken the lesson onboard. Rather than the mixed objectives and wide maps of the previous game, which allowed you to make the most of opportunities for flank attacks, most of the games here return to cramped areas of terrain with simple capture-the-flag objectives, occasionally enlivened by river crossings and other choke points.


Burn baby, burn

That's a shame, especially considering that, in common with other Hunted Cow games, no meaningful attempt is made to link the missions to any of the actual history the game claims to portray. That freedom should have been used to make the scenarios as interesting and challenging as possible.

The AI is workable, and there's a rather more engaging two-player option - although, alas, only for pass-and-play rather than online. There's also a choice of difficulty modes so you can choose between the shallow satisfaction of humiliating a weak opponent, the frustration of one with lots of extra units, or a more pleasant middle ground.

When the challenge is just right, whether that's against a digital opponent or a flesh and blood one, Tank Battle: East Front 1943 is a worthwhile experience for anyone new to the series, or to ardent fans. For the rest of us, there are certainly better ways to get your strategy fix, if not necessarily quite as cheaply.

Tank Battle: East Front 1943

A perfectly playable light strategy game, but the underlying engine is starting to feel very old and repetitive
Score
Matt Thrower
Matt Thrower
Matt is a freelance arranger of words concerning boardgames and video games. He's appeared on IGN, PC Gamer, Gamezebo, and others.