Review written by Eric Pankoke

Buy My Little Tank from Clickgamer

“I know I've seen this game before…” My Little Tank is a variation of the age old “bunch of tanks moving on a grid based arena” theme. There's really nothing new here, but decent aesthetics and solid controls make this a mild diversion between more thought provoking venues.

Graphics Description

The graphics in My Little Tank are good, but certainly not groundbreaking. The tanks are by far the best part of the visuals, though I think I'd find it hard to take any general seriously that was driving a pink tank. The backgrounds seem pretty detailed, but a limited color palette makes everything seem a bit muddled. Explosion effects are pretty slick, and a really enjoy the Terminator-like vortex that ushers in new enemies.

Sound Description

The sound effects are decent but limited mainly to the firing of weapons and resulting explosions. Some noise for the vehicles moving would have been good, and a quick audio for power ups appearing or the enemies appearing in their lightening cloud would have spruced things up a little. There is background music, which as always I commend any Palm developer for, but the soundtrack was not all that compelling. At least they tried.

Gameplay Description

My Little Tank is a very simple game to play. Each mission is comprised of some combination of the following three goals: destroy all enemy vehicles, destroy selected targets, and defend your base. This is basically accomplished by moving your tank around the screen using either the D-Pad or stylus (this is one game where I actually prefer the D-Pad), and shooting with a configurable hardware key. Movement takes place along a grid like interface, and possible directions are major compass points. There is no diagonal movement or shooting in this game. There's not really much of a distinction between the different goals, because defending your base requires you to destroy all missions, and when you're destroying specific targets it suits you to demolish everyone for the sake of gaining extra points.

My main gripe with this game is that it is too easy. There are several power ups you can retrieve throughout the game, including weapons upgrade, speed bonus, smart bombs, freezing opponents, and invincibility. For each 2 weapons upgrades you receive a plus 1 to your attack, up to a maximum upgrade of 6, or +3 attack. Each vehicle has a defense rating between 1 and 5 – at least 5 is the maximum I've seen so far – which denotes how many hits it takes for you to destroy that vehicle. To determine how many hits it will actually take, divide the defense indicator by your attack bonus and round up. In other words, a tank that has +5 defense will only take two shots to destroy if your weapons have a +3 attack. Naturally the game handles all this for you, I just wanted you to get an idea of how powerful the weapons upgrade can be. There is enough availability to power ups in each level that I was maxed out with firepower in no time. Smart bombs destroy everything within a certain range, whether on screen or not, and freezing enemies temporarily halts all opponents in their tracks. Add to that the fact that you can shoot an oncoming shell to destroy it, and the invincibility power up is almost pointless.

The AI was disappointing as well. There were often times where I'd be right in front of an opponent and they didn't shoot me. The paths of the opponents seemed to be generated at random, so there was never any fear that they might be coming after you. Even on the “defend your base” levels, I rarely saw the alert that my base was under attack. I felt like I was playing the “please don't hurt me” level of a Duke Nukem game. This would have been fine had there been different difficulty settings, but as the only option its' kind of sad.

Despite all of that, I did find My Little Tank oddly compelling. Maybe it's just because of the mindless mayhem. You definitely won't be racking your brain for strategy here. Maybe it's just the thrill of driving a tank. Who knows? While I could never see this being the type of game you can't put down, it's certainly a nice break between the long, thought provoking RPGs or adventure games you might be playing.

Pros:

• Good visuals

• Decent sound

• Easy to pick up and play

Cons:

• Too easy to master

• Poor AI

• Fairly repetitive

Conclusion:

Don’t get into My Little Tank expecting some sort of military strategy game, or you’ll be sorely disappointed. In fact, don’t dive into My Little Tank at all unless you’re looking for a quick fix every now and again where you basically get to blow everything up. If that’s your desire, My Little Tank definitely fits the bill.

Score-by-score breakdown

Gameplay:  50%
Graphics:  70%
Sound:  60%

Overall:  60%

Please note that the overall score is more than simply an average of the individual ratings.  Many thanks to Astraware for providing our review copy.

You may wish to search for more reviews of games from Astraware. Alternatively, you can view all the reviews written by Eric Pankoke.