Iron Tank - Review

Having just finished Iron Tank I can tell you two things:

1) The game is actually called Iron Tank The Invasion of Normandy. I find this interesting only due to the fact that I've owned it for probably two decades and didn't know this.

2) This game is absolutely-infriggen-possibly difficult. Kind of.

I say kind of due to the fact that I actually beat it and because I did it in about an hour. You're probably saying "Wait, how could a game be impossibly difficult and yet you beat it in an hour?" Well I say that just because I'm pretty sure that if I had some sort of God mode this game would only be about 10 minutes long. Once you factor in the fact that you die every three goddamn seconds and have to replay the same three screens over and over the game all the sudden goes from 10 minutes to one pulling out your hair, yelling at the TV hour long.

Iron Tank is the story of a secret mission having to do with the invasion of Normandy... I guess. The intro scene is kind of vague and somewhat poorly translated. You start off landing the Allies only tank (from what I could tell) on the beach of... I guess Normandy. From there you have to fight your way through hundreds of other much better armed and better equipped enemy tanks so that you can blow up a giant tank at the end. This was the Allies big goddamn plan. Not "Hey, let's send one man in on foot where maybe he can sneak in and blow up enemy tanks and railways" or "Hey, we have these planes... they're pretty good at killing giant tanks" but "Hey, what's the least sneaky thing we have in all of our arsenal? A tank? Great, send that bad boy in and let him take out all the other tanks. I'm going to lunch." Apparently whoever thought up this secret mission was an idiot.

Basically what you do in Iron Tank is blow up other enemy tanks. Occasionally the game will throw you a train or a submarine or... okay those are the only other enemies I can think of. So basically what you do in Iron Tank is blow up other enemy tanks, trains and submarines. You keep doing that until you reach bosses that look like they were designed by six year old boys. Ever remember drawing pictures (most likely in crayon) of tanks that had like eight canons and four of them shot fire and then the others shot lasers and then there were canons on top of the canons that shot heat seeking rockets! Yeah, meet the end bosses in Iron Tank. Apparently the Allies didn't have that technology, either that or they sent me out in my one canon tank because they're dicks and thought it was funny.

So here you are in your one canon tank and you move from screen to screen trying not to get raped by every tank in Germany's army that's advanced on your position. Then you have an "Aha!" moment... all of the tanks seem to move in a set path! If you can just watch their paths and learn it, you can kill them. Which sometimes works out. Until a random tank comes out of nowhere, or two tanks randomly spawn behind you, or you realize that their tanks can shoot farther than yours or there's one path that's wide enough to move your tank down but not wide enough to move out of the way of the bullets the other tank is shooting at you... I could go on for quite some time. When it comes down to it, your tank is screwed. Just get used to starting over and over and hopefully making a little bit of headway each time. Oh, also? The controls are absolutely horrid, so enjoy that as well!

Iron Tank isn't all bad and the parts where I wasn't stuck playing the same part over and over again fifty goddamn times were generally good. I enjoyed that it had multiple paths to choose from, so I guess if once you got tired of being raped by tanks in one direction you could choose to get raped by a whole new set of tanks. The fact that regain health by running over enemy soldiers was also kind of funny in the same way an 8 bit Grand Theft Auto where you ran over hookers would also be kind of funny.

Overall the game wasn't bad when you weren't playing the same part over and over again, but those parts took up way to much game time for Iron Tank to be good. Maybe I've just become different as a gamer, at eight I probably didn't mind replaying the same part twenty time, but now that I'm older it's just aggravating. That being said, I still had some fun and I did enjoy parts of the game.

Squid.