At first glance, Domark's new Tank Commander may look to be just an updated version of the old Battlezone arcade game. After playing for a little while I started to realize that while that's pretty much was the game is, that isn't a bad thing. As I got more and more into Tank Commander I found layer after layer of playability, strategy, and fun. I know that I should never go into a game expecting one thing or another, and Tank Commander really reinforced that lesson. What looks like it could be just another tank battle game is really something special.
Tank Commander puts you in a modern army tank armed with a coaxial machine gun which is good for taking out troops and small vehicles; mine destroyers which take care of land mines but nothing else; guided missiles which are great for hitting things accurately but aren't great on damage; three different types of shells, including normal, high explosive and armor-piercing; and a flame thrower which doesn't have much range but does the job on any infantry close by. Also, for good measure, air support has been thrown in on your side for when you get in a particularly difficult situation. An airstrike will get rid of most everything in your immediate area.
Controlling the tank is the one area that I thought could have been improved a bit with better joystick options. You can use a joystick, but the only choices you're given are to move and fire. There is no turret control availability for the joystick, which means if you want to use it, you must also use the keyboard to move the turret and choose the weapons. That means it's much easier to use the keyboard by itself. The default keyboard settings are fairly efficient, but if you don't like them you can assign any tank function to any key you want. So as far as the keyboard goes you can arrange things pretty much the way you want, but if you prefer using a joystick, you're out of luck.
On top of mastering the difficult task of moving the tank in one direction and firing in every other, Tank Commander gives you the chore of commanding multiple tanks in the same mission. You can hop from tank to tank shooting bad guys. You also change tanks if yours is destroyed. At first this feature was annoying. but as I played more and started to get into strategy, it became apparent just how well these missions were designed for multiple tanks.
Tank Commander does make driving a little easier with its map system. You can choose any point on the map that your tank can sit on (not on water or on top of a building) and assign your tank to drive there on its own. The quickest route to the target is the one automatically plotted. This is especially helpful when you need to do a lot of driving and shooting at the same time, but, for me at least, this was the single most difficult to learn because of all the bumping around and course-changing that the tank does automatically. It's very difficult to get a bead on an enemy when the tank decides to take a hard right between some sand dunes and then takes a hard left between those palm trees.
There are different scenarios ranging from the desert to frozen wasteland, each one rated on its degree of difficulty, and within those scenarios are sub-missions: little goals to accomplish before the main objective is reached. These mainly serve as saving stations for each Commander you develop, allowing you to be able to enter a mission at the beginning of the sub-mission you left at. One nice unexpected surprise are the ways that the missions are designed. In several missions, but not all of them, you have to stop certain enemy units from reaching a certain place, like a radio tower or their base. It's a race against time as you drive across the area trying to reach these units and destroy them before they reach their destination. If there has to be a timed mission in a game, I really prefer this kind of mission opposed to having to wipe out all bad guys before the timer runs out. It adds a little bit of realism to the game when you try to ambush a convoy on a highway rather than shooting everyone in three minutes. However, one thing I found out is that these missions are quite a bit more difficult than I expected. The missions in which you do have to catch the bad guys require great timing and great shooting, while all the other bad guys are shooting at you. I don't get frustrated much at games, but trying to get through the first stage of even just the intermediate missions started to get me irritated.
The graphics were quite amazing once I started getting into the game. At first it looks like the landscape is barren with only the major objects being shown, thus giving it that empty Battlezone feel. When compared to something very detailed like Armored Fist, it very much appears that way. There is an option to turn on high detail in Tank Commander which gets rid of a lot of the barren feel, but that really, really slows down performance. I played on a Pentium 60 and high detail ran very choppy. Low detail ran as smooth as silk and the main objects were mostly unaffected. The main thing that detail affects is the texture of the ground and the mountains. I also thought that, while the tanks and other vehicles didn't have the detailed camouflage like in Fist, they did seem more 3D in the way they moved. They were more fluid and easier to interact with. Tank Commander makes no claims of being a simulator. This is an action game, game, game through and through. There are even places to get power ups where a cheesy 80's video game heart floated up the screen and gave my tank some health. I thought floating hearts were all but forgotten.
The highlight of Tank Commander was the head-to-head play, which adds a little twist to the traditional multiplayer shooters. Instead of just counting how many times the players kill each other, Tank Commander is a capture the flag game in multiplayer mode. There are four flags, each a different color, stashed around the playing area, and the first player to grab all of the flags and return them to their home base wins. However, if you have a flag and take a hit, that flag is dropped and the player must go back and get it. Also, Tank Commander doesn't keep track of how many times you kill the other players, but how many times in which you yourself have been killed.
Tank Commander took me by surprise. It's a great package and really a lot of fun to play which, in the end, is the most important thing. The play is smooth and lifelike, and while it isn't the most realistic looking game ever developed, it is very realistic in the fluid 3D movement of the tanks and aircraft. After the initial difficulty of learning how to run the darned thing, Tank Commander really sucked me in and got me hooked. The only real problem is the difficulty but, again, that could just be me. When you get killed, and you will, it takes a bit of time to get the mission reloaded again from the CD. This wasn't annoying the first 20 times I tried, but the second 20 times got a bit tedious. The game is worth every bit of the wait, though. Tank Commander has the right combination of playability, graphics and fun, and I loved it - even though I did get blown up a lot.
