Of Tanks and Demons III

Genre: Top-Down Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Of Tanks and Demons III (no clue what became of the first two numbered games) is a Top-Down Arcade-style game released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players navigating mazes in a tank to pick up “photons” while avoiding or fighting off demons.

Okay, so right from the start, this game’s presentation is… really, really bad. The 3D visuals the game uses seem copy-pasted and don’t really mesh together at all, the soundtrack is full of metal-style electric guitar-heavy songs that work well with the game’s themes but aren’t memorable, and the story… well, let’s just say the story is both laughably bad and even more laughably poorly-translated.

Given the unimpressive presentation, you might be tempted to dismiss Of Tanks and Demons III, and you’ll be even further tempted to do so seeing that this game is basically working from the framework of a Pac-Man clone. However, to this game’s credit, it does a few things differently that help to set it apart.

Firstly, players have a limited ammo supply to temporarily take out enemies, though some enemies are more resilient than others. Also, levels often have control points that must be cleared by staying in that spot for a while. In addition, there are also boss levels that are reasonably well-crafted. And the game even has a nice progression system that allows you to upgrade your tank or even buy new tanks by spending points gained within the levels.

There are a few flaws here beyond the poor presentation, however. The level design is at times poor, with a lot of pointless dead ends. The gameplay is poorly-explained and at times not explained at all. This latter point doesn’t seem like it would matter all that much in a simple game, but players often have to approach new elements like new enemies with a trial-and-error sort of approach that’s not very fun.

All things considered, Of Tanks and Demons III doesn’t look like much, and it has a few issues that keep it from being an even better game, but despite these problems it manages to be a surprisingly decent game with some surprisingly original ideas to bring to an extremely old gameplay formula. If you’re looking to add a new Arcade-style game to your collection and don’t mind it looking terrible, Of Tanks and Demons III may be worth the low $5 price tag.

tl;dr – Of Tanks and Demons III is an Arcade-style game that could be described as “Pac-Man with Tanks”, but it’s actually surprisingly more original than that. It has an absolutely terrible presentation and it suffers from a few gameplay issues, but overall this is a clever take on an old genre, and fans of Arcade-style games who can forgive its flaws may find it worth giving a try.

Grade: C+

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