I decided to give Tank! Tank! Tank! a try try try. It was originally a Wii U launch game, but they recently converted it into a “free” game. And by free game, I mean a skimpy demo that wants to charge you money for DLC for practically everything. But first, I had to download it. You need to have 2,121 MB (over 2 GB) free in order to download it, which is ridiculous when you consider how little content the demo actually has. I had to delete both of my Rayman demos and Wii Street U to make room for it. Once you start the game up and enter your name and choose your icon, you are presented with an option of playing story mission or multiplayer.
I chose story mission. After choosing a support character and watching a short video, you are taken to a screen where you choose your mission. Only one is listed, so naturally I chose that one. I clicked the mission, but nothing happened. Do I need to pick a different tank or something? I scroll through the list of tanks, and only one is available. I re-select it, yet I still can’t start the mission. At this point, I’m wondering if I’m overlooking something really obvious so I look up a video on Youtube, only to see someone else confused by it as well. The story mode is not available in the demo. So why isn’t that clearly stated when you try to start it up? Wow, what a waste of time that was.
The other mode is the multiplayer mode, and that does have three modes you can try: Monster battle, free-for-all, and team versus. In monster battle, everyone teams up to destroy a common enemy. It may be 100 big spiders or one gigantic monster. The action is okay, but there’s nothing particularly captivating about it. And it has this annoying habit of popping up huge notices, telling you a teammate has been killed or showing the monster’s health level. I can understand why it would want to display that information, but must it be in a gigantic window smack-dab in the middle of the screen? It blocks your view and it makes no sense to put it there when there’s all sorts of free space in the corners.
As for the other two modes, they’re your standard deathmatch battles (but in tanks, of course). Free-for-all is every man for himself and team versus is a team battle. I was just playing against computer opponents, but I could see how this could be fun if you had three other friends to join in the action. And that is probably the ideal crowd for Tank! Tank! Tank! If you often have a group of friends over to play multi-player games, you might want to give this game a try. But if you primarily stick to single-player games like I do, this isn’t even worth the free download.