Tank Battle Heroes

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local) 2-4 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

Tank Battle Heroes is a 2-Stick Shooter released on mobile devices in 2018 and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2021. In this game, players drive a tank in battle against other tanks in a military facility.

The graphics here are sufficient, but extremely unimpressive. The 3D tank models in the game menus look quite nice, but in battle, everything looks fairly simple, especially the environments. Similarly, the sound and music fits well enough, with sufficient exploding noises and dramatic music, but there’s nothing memorable or noteworthy about it. In fact, the most noteworthy thing about this game on a technical front is how it crashed multiple times in menus while I was trying to play it.

This game’s lack of noteworthy qualities extends to its gameplay. I should note that even though I call this game a 2-Stick Shooter, by default it has an auto-aim setting turned on, meaning that all players need to do is hold down the “fire” button while driving around and evading enemy fire. This runs into problems, however, when you need to fire at a non-enemy target like a gate, and the game insists on targeting the nearest enemy anyway, regardless of whether they’re on the other side of an impenetrable wall.

This game has local and online play too, but don’t think you’re going to find anything particularly worth your time here – the game brings over your progress from the campaign into the multiplayer, meaning those who have snoozed through more of the game’s single-player content are automatically at an advantage in multiplayer. However, even then, I honestly found the competition lacking – the gameplay devolved into driving around in circles and ducking behind scenery to avoid enemy fire while firing non-stop like an idiot, and I’m a bit embarrassed to say that the game so heavily favored hit-and-run tactics that are my bread and butter that I easily defeated countless other players who were better-equipped than me. That’s not a humblebrag, either – this game clearly has balancing issues online.

Turning my attention back to offline stuff, it’s very apparent that this game was designed for a platform with a touchscreen… and then subsequently ported to Nintendo Switch without touchscreen support. It was also clearly designed to bilk players out of their money through microtransactions, though at the very least I can say that the Nintendo Switch version of the game doesn’t seem to allow for any real-money purchases at this time. The game is so poorly-optimized for the Nintendo Switch that just navigating through menus is a chore, as pressing right to pick an option to the right may send your cursor up instead, and simply selecting the menu option you want may prove to be far more difficult than it should ever be.

In the end, Tank Battle Heroes is a bad port of a mediocre game. Even if the game worked like a charm, it would still be an uninspired, repetitive, boring 2-Stick Shooter with unbalanced online play. But add in all the buggy problems, menus that don’t work properly, and the complete lack of touchscreen support in a game that’s clearly designed with touchscreen in mind, and you have a game that’s absolutely not worth your time or money on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Tank Battle Heroes is a bad port of a mediocre 2-Stick Shooter. It’s buggy, with frustrating navigation issues in game menus, balancing issues in online multiplayer, and the core gameplay just isn’t very compelling. You have countless better options for 2-Stick Shooters on Nintendo Switch, get one of those instead.

Grade: D

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