Tank Beat review

Tank Beat combines rolling combat action and real-time strategy command, dividing attention between the top screen's muddy 3D rendering and the touchscreen's rote 2D world of targeting, route management, and support direction. Draw a blue line from your tank's radar blip to a destination, sweep the stylus to change the view, blow enemies up with a tense tap of the corresponding red dot, and issue orders to companions. The elements are simple, and there might've been a decent game in there somewhere, but any potential enjoyment is squashed by the poor execution of every last element.

Drawing a path for your non-descript box is simple, but the resulting blue line can't be altered or extended. Worse, drawing new ones results in a screeching sitting-duck halt, and the reference line disappears entirely any time a cut-scene interrupts the mission. Even without these annoyances, combat boils down to ceaselessly drawing semi-circles around red blips, and the fact that anything but a dead-center tap yields a miss prolongs the life of even stationary targets. When you do finally hit something, you're rewarded with a laughable pixelated explosion and nails-on-blackboard sound effects.