The Good: Tower
defense plus attacking, flexible map and unit editor with online
sharing, chaotic battles
The Not So Good:
Insufficient interface with poor information regarding weapon use and
strategy, unnecessarily lengthy missions with elongated stalemates,
high difficulty, few campaign missions
What say you?
Offense is added to a tower defense game with very inadequate
feedback: 4/8
NOTE: I am dumb. Holding shift can box-select units and you can filter out units using a division tool; both of these are mentioned in the manual and I simply missed them. I apologize to any gratuitous tanks I may have offended.
MY POORLY WRITTEN INTRODUCTION
Trench warfare during World War I
caused both sides to sit and wait. Infantry charges were too costly
because both sides lacked the tactics and the technology to
counteract the powerful machine gun. It wasn't until tanks entered
the battlefield that the stalemate was broken and a victor was
determined. Imagine, if you will, a Great War that never ended, and
now in the future mechs and lasers have been added to break the
centuries' old conflict. Gratuitous Tank Battles is a tower defense
game where you place defensive turrets or queue up tanks and infantry
to fight those emplacements. We know there will be tank battles, but
shall they be gratuitous?
GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Not surprisingly, Gratuitous Tank
Battles features graphics similar in style to Gratuitous
Space Battles, Positech’s previous offering. The game is
in 2-D, with detailed unit sprites that show damage (though not as
dramatically as a 3-D version would) and look nice, though a bit
static, when zoomed in. The unit animations are a bit lacking and
very basic, but the amount of weapon effects, with shields, bullets,
and lasers flying across the screen, cover up the shortcomings here.
Explosions could have been more violent, instead of units
degenerating into a simple black heap. The maps are varied in
appearance, with different biomes and time of day effects giving a
distinctive feel. While some won’t care for the visual approach of
the game, I didn’t find any major faults with it. The sound design
is underwhelming. There are plenty of chaotic battle effects when
units are being shot, but Gratuitous Tank Battles lacks campy voice
work and memorable music to accompany your violent escapades.
ET AL.
Gratuitous Tank Battles starts with the
campaign, a series of twelve missions where you can act on offense or
defense: the attacker must funnel a set amount of units towards one
of the map exits, while it is the defender’s job to stop them. The
game features several difficulty levels, but I found all of them to
be quite challenging. Most maps feature multiple paths to the exits,
which allows the attacker to vary their tactics while the defender
must guard all possible roads. Since only twelve missions are not
enough, Gratuitous Tank Battles thankfully includes online
challenges, where you can upload your best efforts for others to
compete against (there are currently over three hundred challenges to
try). Not only can you upload results from the campaign missions, you
can also challenge others to custom map layouts designed using the
included editor. The map editor is easy to use, allowing the designer
to specify available paths, deployment locations, and eye candy to
make each locale appear more war torn. Even better is the robust unit
editor, which allows you to easily create offensive units and
defensive turrets. Choose a chassis (tank, mech, turret), components
(armor or shields, a weapon, an engine, and targeting assistance),
and augmentations (increasing the rate of fire or damage against
armor, for example) and off you go. The unit cost, speed, weight, and
other ratings are automatically calculated and placed into the game.
Additional components are unlocked with experience, and I felt things
unlocked quickly enough to not feel restrictive. The unit and map
editor should drastically increase the life of the product, as any
ability to include community-made content is positive.
There is a rock-paper-scissors system
to the game of Gratuitous Tank Battles, but the proper counters are
buried by the woeful interface. In essence, lasers destroy armor and
bullets (from cannons and guns) destroy shields (plus flamethrowers
for infantry units), so it’s a matter of placing the right turret
or sending the right units. The problem is that the game never
explicitly says this (it’s concealed within the unit editor), and
certainly not while you are playing a battle. The vague unit
descriptions aren’t enough to quickly determine on the fly which
units are best, and the weapon tool-tips display the name only,
rather than pertinent stats. You can’t even see any information
about enemy units (just the name might offer a clue), so you can be
at a total loss while your units die again and again. I would like to
see improvements in several areas. First off, units need better and
automated descriptions based on their weaponry (like “good against
shields”). Secondly, weapon icons are really terrible and
indistinct: I cannot tell the difference between a laser and a cannon
when I mouse over different units. Solid color-coded backgrounds
(say, red for both bullets and armor) would aid in selecting the
right units for the right job. Lastly, a filtered list of units
(displaying only turrets or tanks with lasers and shields, for
example) would make placing things a lot easier. The functionality of
the interface in Gratuitous Tank Battles is basic at best and gets in
the way of efficiently playing the game at worst.
Gratuitous Tank Battles gives you a
quantity of supplies that regenerate over time (until a time limit is
reached) to purchase new units. There are only a handful of areas
that new units on both offense and defense can be placed, so there is
definitely some strategy in using the prime real estate for your best
units. You are limited in having a certain number of units of each
class (only four heavy tanks, for example), ostensibly for balancing
but I never really saw a need for that particular restriction. While
units will automatically march to the other side of the map and
engage nearby units, you can specify particular targets and explicit
paths to follow. In yet another interface shortcoming, orders can
only be issued to one unit at a time, instead of being able to
box-select several units of interest; this makes for added tedium,
especially when many units need your immediate attention. I felt that
games in Gratuitous Tank Battles last about twice as long as they
need to: the high number of dead units on both sides in the beginning
and middle of a game serve no purpose, since you can’t explicitly
see what attributes the enemy units have anyway and they will be dead
before the end of the match is reached. While you can accelerate
time, games are still too long: I always had to significantly
accelerate time in every match to cut down on the boredom as I
watched my units helplessly get slaughtered one after another.
Gratuitous Tank Battles is a difficult game, thanks in large part to
the obstructive interface. Your AI opponent can follow pre-scripted
placements or dynamically adjust to your units, and it does both of
these things well. Still, Gratuitous Tank Battles can be very
frustrating to play, since you can have absolutely no idea how to
improve your tactics thanks to the absence of useful information.
IN CLOSING
The lack of meaningful feedback (with
all-too-brief tooltips) and a slow pace (even with accelerated time)
hurt Gratuitous Tank Battles. It's really hard to figure out exactly
why your units are dying; there is a system in place (bullets
penetrate shields while lasers destroy armor) but the game tries to
make this information impossible to find. Placing units and turrets
in the heat of battle is not the time to hide pertinent data from
users, but Gratuitous Tank Battles succeeds in this dubious goal.
Color-coded unit icons and a filtered list of units would work
wonders in making the game more accessible. The games also last a bit
too long for my tastes, and considering all of the customization
options Gratuitous Tank Battles provides, I'm surprised game length
isn't more flexible: I'd really like to tighten up the action and
have less units and faster matches. Despite the very short length of
the campaign, there is a map and unit editor that has spawned several
hundred user challenges, giving the game life beyond the initial
battles. Creating this content is straightforward and fun; I just
wish the actual gameplay caught up with this level of accessibility.
Ultimately, the lack of tactile feedback will relegate Gratuitous
Tank Battles to cult status, an “also ran” in the ever-expanding
world of tower defense games.
