Tank Universal Review (PC)

By Joe Haygood | August 30, 2008

It’s funny when a game tries to create a homage to a movie, but ends up invoking remembrances of an entirely different experience.  All the visuals are there, to put a feel of one universe in your brain, but once you start playing, you see the vision in a wholly different way.  Such was my experience with Tank Universal.  It shoots from the hip for a TRON-like experience, complete with high-gloss neon, but in the end, the gameplay threw me down memory lane, for a completely different experience.

The game starts off in a rather strange way, showing you an old man, who seems to be sick.  He sounds rather ill, and is upset with what is left of his life on the planet.  He is given a VR helmet from a friend who asks him to use it to cheer himself up.  From that point, you are transferred into the main meat of the game.  A strange way to introduce the world that you are going to be in, but it in itself is a means to transporting the gamer to the world of Tank Universal.

Tank Universal at its heart is a tank battle game, with strategy that harkens back to a favorite game of my youth, M1 Tank Platoon.  Each level is set up by a small bit of story, which moves you into a battlefield of digital tank goodness.  Controls are simple enough to grasp, and while the combat seems simple enough, there is enough tank sim under the hood of this game, to really have you thinking your way through combat each and every time.  From planning your attack through the overhead map, to walking your shots onto the target, the game slowly grows on you, as you learn the mechanics of hitting a target from across the map.

Battlefields are diverse and always will give the player a logistical challenge.  Each side in Tank Universal, starts with a home base and from there goes through a capture the flag mechanic where you have to get the key from the other team’s base and bring it back to your base.  This is easy in theory, but very difficult in practice, as you have to deal with enemy turrets, tanks and other battlefield oddities while staging your attack.  No two battlefields will look the same, ensuring a new thought process to each fight.

While the larger battles can get a bit tedious at times, they are broken up nicely, by chunks of the story.  While it is in no way, Oscar winning material, and sometimes the dialog would make me cringe, it tells a nice story of oppression and the battle for freedom.  A bit boilerplate at times, but there is enough going on, that you want to keep playing the game to see what is going on, and who is really working in your best interest.

Make no mistake about it, designer Dialogue Design was going for was Tron all the way.  From the distinct blue and red neon, to characters that play games for a malevolent dictator, Tank Universal gives you a neat little world with a story of resistance fighters and oppressed people.  But no matter how you spin it, it just has too much influence from Tron.  There are even some shot for shot references to the movie in question, including the main ship flyover, or the prison sequence, along with others.  I am all for giving reverence to a pop culture icon, but when reverence turns to very similar shot for shot recreations; it makes the game lose value.

One item that did become an issue while playing Tank Universal in some of the larger battlefields was the chaos that starts to envelop around you can be disorienting, to the point of the player dying quite a bit, due to way too much happening at once on the screen.  Also, the sound effects are good, but as you take damage, a repetitive beep occurs in the background to remind you, but it just reminded me of that beep you hear when you call a company that records all conversations, and marks them with that beep.  It really started to grate on me after a couple of hours.  Screen clutter also starts to catch up with you as there is a ton of info presented to you on your HUD.  At points in the game, I felt I was getting more HUD than game, which tends to bring you out of the game experience.

At the end of the day, Tank Universal offers a challenging gaming experience, not had on the PC is quite a few years.  It will challenge you and give you a surprising amount of fun for its smaller price.  It tends to follow a little too close to the Tron script at times, and the dialog will hurt your eyes at times, but it gives the player solid tactical tank battles.  Aeropause gives Tank Universal 3.5 Aeropausonauts out of 5.