In the years since the Nintendo DS was released, there have been some great games that make excellent use of the system's touch screen, and some great games that nearly ignore it. Tank Beat's use of the touch screen is innovative, interesting, and ultimately not much fun.
Tank Beat is a fairly straightforward tank battle game, descended in a stately lineage from the classic arcade title Battlezone. Tanks roam the landscape, launching shells and firing machine guns at each other until the good guys or the bad guys all blow up. Wide-eyed manga-style warriors trade quips in between battles in a storyline reminiscent of Advance Wars' tongue-in-cheek plot, only more serious and less good.
There's a nice variety of tanks and some interesting missions, as well as wireless and online multiplayer battle, and overall it would be a fun if unremarkable game except for the controls. The action takes place on the top screen, but the tank is controlled using the touch screen. Your tank is a blue dot, and the enemy tanks are red dots. Want to drive the tank somewhere? Draw a line for it to follow. To rotate the tank's turret, tap where you want it to face. To fire at an enemy, hold down the left shoulder button and tap your victim. In other words, the game feels less like driving a tank than drawing a map to show someone how to get to the company picnic.
It's unusual to see a game with a single flaw that brings it down. Generally if a game has one big problem, it has a lot of little problems as well. Not so with Tank Beat. It's a solid workhorse of a game that tried a little too hard to be innovative.
--Lore Sjöberg
Wired: Tanks are neat.
Tired: They're not so neat when they look like little dots.
$30, O3
Rating: 
