Arenas Of Tanks Review

Another week, another review, another Ratalaika game; Arenas of Tanks. If by now you haven’t heard of Ratalaika Games, they publish video games, usually the variety that you wouldn’t be able to deem “triple A” and mostly easy achievement/trophy games on the respective platforms.

This one will grant you an easily obtainable 1000 Gamerscore for you achievement hunters out there, sadly I don’t think you’ll be granted much enjoyment, however.

Arenas of Tanks places you in control of a little toy tank, and to accompany you on your battles against other enemy tanks, is a rather generic action soundtrack, comprised of the same song played on loop throughout, which doesn’t take long at all to get tedious.

You can jump in the Challenge Mode, which gives you five different environments to take on enemy tanks in, each area gives you five different levels, which differ so subtly and become a repeat of themselves.

You’ll have to take down 3 “waves of enemies” but each wave consists of around 2 or 3 tanks. In Arenas of Tanks you also find yourself driving around, unable to fire whilst collecting orbs, which is about as fun as it sounds on top of another “wave” based level with instant death enabled.

Once you’ve completed these tasks, you’ll be brought to the boss battle, which is simply a 1v1 with an enemy tank with a substantial amount of health more than you. Aside from being able to fire 3 times at once the boss tanks don’t do anything special that really sets them apart from your basic enemy tanks.

Once you’re finished with the main challenge mode, you can jump into the arcade mode, which comprises of the same 5 areas and places you in an endless wave of tanks, so if you didn’t enjoy the wave based stuff originally, then you’ll find replay-ability here unless being able to upgrade your tank/buy ally tanks floats your boat.

One positive here is the variety in areas, you battle in Autumn Ruins, Daytime Garden, Winter Nights, Neon Playground & Toy Tank Attack. The latter two being the coolest and most infesting to traverse as the first 3 feel a little bland and basic. Neon Playground gives you a Tron-like feel whilst Toy Tank Attack give you that Toy Story feeling.

Sadly though, if the gameplay, which I feel is just bland and stale isn’t enough to keep you around or give you any kind of replayability, then I doubt the small, tiniest bit of character is going to help do that either.

Verdict

Sadly despite the simple, easy to get to grips with mechanics in Arenas Of Tanks, it doesn’t add up to anything substantially fun or worthwhile sticking around for. Missions are subtle clones of themselves for the most part and the arcade mode, which should add replay-ability, struggles to do this due to it’s simply a carbon copy of a few main mission within the core challenge mode.

A positive takeaway from this, being a Ratalaika game is that you will be able to sweep up the 1000 Gamerscore between 10-30 mins without breaking a single sweat. It’s also surprising to see a game of this caliber let you fiddle with screen shake, bloom and depth of field within the settings.

Currently available on the Xbox Store for £4.99, I’d personally only be able to recommend Arenas Of Tanks to the most hardcore achievement hunters, who can justify dropping that £5 in exchange for an easy bit of padding on your Xbox account.

DISCLAIMER: Reviewer has played the game for an hour and has 1000/1000G or 11/11 achievements.