Tank! Tank! Tank!
Arcade tank shooter with B-movie kaiju battles.
Tank! Tank! Tank! is a 2009 third-person shooter arcade game from Namco Bandai Games. It came to the Wii U in 2012 as a North American launch title. The game follows the 1996 arcade title Tokyo Wars as its spiritual successor.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Namco Bandai Games
- Producer
- Makoto Ishii
- Genre
- Third-person shooter
- Modes
- Single-player, multiplayer
- Platforms
- Arcade, Wii U
- Composer
- Hiroki Hashimoto
Facts from the source article.
Gameplay
Players control a tank and shoot monsters with ammunition. A camera called the NamCam takes a player's photo, which is used as an avatar to identify each tank. Levels contain destructible elements, and weapons include a plasma bolt and a machine gun. Accessories such as military helmets and wrestling masks can be added to avatars. Collateral damage against the city background is encouraged. Players can form two rival teams, cooperate against monsters, or fight each other.
Development and release
Tank! Tank! Tank! was created by Makoto Ishii at Namco Bandai Games, who aimed to let players express themselves through the game’s quick action and visual style. He built it around a vertical monitor, an idea he took from cell phones, because he thought people already used to holding their phones vertically would feel right at home with the controls. Ishii also believed the tall screen helped players feel a sense of self-expression, and he designed the enemies and level layouts to make players feel overwhelmingly powerful. Some publications have pointed to the Earth Defense Force series, released by Namco Bandai’s subsidiary D3 Publisher, as another likely influence. The music was written by Hiroki Hashimoto, who later scored Pac-Man & Galaga Dimensions and some tracks for Super Smash Bros. for 3DS. The game is a spiritual follow-up to Tokyo Wars, a 1996 Namco arcade title where tanks also blasted enemies. It ran on the Namco System ES1, an arcade board powered by Linux. Radio Nikkei reported that the game had a difficult development process. Namco Bandai showed Tank! Tank! Tank! at the 2009 Japan Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, alongside the lightgun game Deadstorm Pirates. It launched in Japan in October 2009, then in North America and Europe later that year, all under the Namco brand. A port for the Wii U was announced in September 2012 as a launch title in North America, arriving on November 18, 2012, followed by Europe on November 30 and Japan on December 26. In Japan, the Wii U version was a free-to-play download on the Nintendo eShop, with the single-player campaign free and other modes sold as downloadable content. A physical retail copy came out on February 21, 2013. In Europe and North America, the game switched to free-to-play on February 14, 2013 and May 2, 2013, respectively.
Reception
The arcade release of Tank! Tank! Tank! earned praise from critics. Justin Epperson of 1Up.com liked its over-the-top nature and fast, chaotic gameplay. Radio Nikkei’s staff highlighted the powerful weapons and thrilling action, saying it would keep players returning. Game Watch’s Toyotomi Kazutaka praised the arcade cabinet’s vibrating seats and the exhilarating feel of its weapon selection. On Wii U, the game sold 40,243 units in Japan, ranking among the platform’s top 50 sellers there. Yet Metacritic classified it as “generally unfavorable.” Reviewers mainly faulted its sparse modes and content. GameSpot’s Britton Peele called it “hours of boredom” from a game not designed for extended play. IGN’s Casey Lynch and GamesRadar+’s Kevin Knezevic both criticized the repetitive story missions, with Knezevic noting co-op only slightly helped. Patrick Barnett of Nintendo World Report and Peele both found the campaign lacked replay value and variety. Barnett also slammed the controls for making the game needlessly hard. Most outlets agreed Tank! Tank! Tank! was a shallow arcade port with too little content to warrant a home console release.
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