When I was in high school, my neighbor joined the US military and went to the Middle East to fight in the Gulf War. He was on a tank crew there and when he came back, I remember him telling us how outclassed the Iraqi military was by the US tank crews. American tanks were so painfully superior, they could literally take out enemy tank formations that were miles away and out of visible range without the Iraqis having any idea they were there. It was a very one-sided combat situation that I’m oddly reminded of when playing Attack of the Toy Tanks.
In Attack of the Toy Tanks, you play a wind-up tank in a child’s playroom fighting other wind-up tanks. Initially, I was reminded of Combat for the Atari 2600, one of the first and best games ever released for the system and possibly the most fun you can have in a versus tank game. Sadly, Attack of the Toy Tanks is nowhere near as fun as Combat.
Essentially, this is a series of staged combat scenarios, single screen, where you just try and shoot all the other tanks. Mutually assured destruction doesn’t count either. You have to kill everyone and survive. Normally, that wouldn’t be particularly challenging, but Attack of the Toy Tanks has some of the least intuitive controls I’ve seen in some time. Forward and back are the L1 and L2 buttons respectively, and the left stick controls the direction your tank faces while the right one controls the gun turret. It sounds simple, but when you actually start to play, you find out that it’s clunky as hell to only turn with the left stick and not move with it.
That wouldn’t be a problem usually, but in this case, reaction time is everything. Those enemy toy tanks? They’re so fast and accurate that they may as well be Americans shooting you down at every move. You quickly begin to feel like those ill-fated Iraqi tank crews from the Gulf War as you attempt futilely to dodge their incredibly precise counterattacks while vainly struggling to dodge obstacles and turn. It just doesn’t work out well. The entire control scheme design simply fails on every level.
Attack of the Toy Tanks consists of 60 levels of mind-numbingly difficult scenarios while fighting poorly designed controls, as well as a multiplayer section (which I didn’t have the opportunity to try). I suppose that two people struggling to fight it out might be more fun than getting obliterated repeatedly by an overly precise AI, but it’s still no Combat.
Ultimately, at $4.99, you’re getting what you pay for though. Ratalaika Games would have been much better off modifying the controls to allow for forward motion and direction control with the left stick, making for a significantly more enjoyable experience, but sadly, this simply isn’t the case. If a patch came out for that though, I’d give it another go because the concept of the game is simple, solid and fun. It’s just the execution that’s fatally flawed. Go check it out if it’s your sort of thing or if it goes on sale cheap. Just don’t get your expectations too high.
A digital copy of Attack of the Toy Tanks was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review. It was played with a PS4 Pro on a Sony 55” LED TV.