XP Arcade: Tank Force

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Namco loved a maze during their golden age of arcade hits. Pac-Man, of course, is the high-profile example, and the game that helped spur on the maze craze in the first place. Those pellets had to be eaten, and a maze had to be navigated to get to them all in a manner that would help you avoid death by ghost. There was also Dig Dug, which went out of its way to be a maze game that wasn’t Pac-Man. Instead of wandering around a predetermined maze to find the most efficient path, you yourself were the maze maker. You’d dig your way around a (mostly) untouched playing area, to make your way to the pickups to collect for points and the enemies you needed to defeat however you saw fit; the dead ends you ran into would be of your own making, sure, but so were all the traps laid for the enemies whose demise was the point.

In between Pac-Man, which released in the summer of 1980, and 1982’s Dig Dug, came Tank Battalion. This was also an arcade game, that received a home conversion for the MSX as well as an international release. In Tank Battalion, you controlled — you guessed it — a tank. You were placed inside a maze full of enemies, but instead of having to navigate your way around the maze like in Pac-Man, you could modify said maze by shooting at it. Pac-Man was designed for you to discover the best way to navigate an existing maze, and Dig Dug had you making the entire maze yourself by digging your way through the ground. Tank Battalion was the midpoint, where you could pick and choose when to use the existing maze for both offensive and defensive purposes, and when to blow holes in it because it was going to make more sense for your goals.

Tank Battalion would be followed up by a Famicom release, Battle City, which also wound up with Nintendo Vs. and Game Boy editions down the line. While it’s very much Tank Battalion, again, it’s also clearly a sequel, given the leaps in visuals and sound and features. The Famicom edition featured co-op multiplayer as well as a level editor, which has, in the years since, led to the game staying alive via ROM hacks. Namco would finish up with this series in 1991, with the arcade-only Tank Force, an entry that not presented this explosive maze title in 16-bit glory, but also refined some of the gameplay in ways that make it the title in the series you should most want to play, unless your goal is to mess with that level editor.

The thing is, you couldn’t play Tank Force for the longest time. It only released in arcades in Japan, and then, for whatever reason, Namco never bothered including it in any of their Namco Museum releases for over two decades into that project. It took until the 16th edition of Namco Museum, in 2017, for Namco to include Tank Force and give it an international release, to boot. It’s here now, however, as part of the Namco Museum compilation on the Switch, and, in 2023, it received a standalone Arcade Archives release on the Switch and Playstation 4, as well. (Battle City, by the way, is also included in the present within Namco Museum Archives Vol. 2, one of Namco’s compilations of Famicom releases published under the Namcot brand.)

Here’s how Tank City works: you are a tank. You are fighting many, many other tanks of varying degrees of armor thickness, as well as other military vehicles, like fast-moving jeeps that drop very annoying dynamite all over the place. There are bosses every few stages, comically large ones with guns that will obliterate you just the same as the smaller guns, but more emphatically and with less confusion over what might have happened there. You’re doing all of this within a maze of defensive walls and buildings, much of which you can blow up as you see fit in order to reshape the maze the way you want it to be. Your enemies are also doing this, however, and they’re doing it in order to make their way to your base, which you’re supposed to be protecting. Once you’ve cleared a stage of all the enemies within it, you’ve successfully completed it, but sometimes that’s an easier said than done thing considering the sheer volume of foes, how easily you go down, and how they’re all gunning for the same thing.

There’s co-op multiplayer, which really adds to the chaos and the fun, and loads of power-ups that’ll appear within the playing area and change the nature of your abilities or the onslaught against you. One power-up shrinks you, making you move much faster, but you remain as powerful as you were and just as fragile as before, too. Others improve your weaponry or change it altogether, either until they run out or you die. There’s a screen-clearing, enormous bomber that appears overhead and blasts everything below it. There are shields, for both your tank and for your base, a power-up that stops time and lets you wreak havoc unimpeded, and, on rare occasions, an extend.

Sometimes, these power-ups will appear in places that are probably too dangerous to go to at the moment. Is it worth it to abandon the base, or move that far from the base, in order to get [power-up], is a question you’ll have to ask and answer on the fly pretty regularly. Even when a rare extend shows up, it might not be worth it to go get it depending on how aggressive the assault on the base is. Playing in co-op can help alleviate quite a bit of this, since someone can stay behind while another ventures further out into the base to aggressively counterattack, but given how easily you can be cornered and swarmed, again, even seeing an extend out there might be something of a trap that’ll cost you a life, anyway.

In an even rarer version of Tank Force — included in the Arcade Archives edition, but not the Namco Museum one — you can now play with up to three others in co-op, which is, as you can imagine, complete madness. In a good way, though. There are lots of enemies, and lots of pathways, and it’s pretty easy to end up dying amid all of that, even if you fire faster than your foes and can cancel their shots in midair with your own. You’re still a tank, which means you’ve got tank controls, which means it’s pretty easy for another vehicle to sneak up behind you, or trap you somewhere with some dynamite, Bomberman-style. Having some pals around to watch your back literally changes the game.

Whereas the original Tank Battalion was fairly simplistic in terms of terrain and blocks and enemy types, Tank Force has all kinds of differentiation. There are standard enemy tanks and speed tanks, which are faster than the regular ones but take just as many shots to kill (one). There are some tougher tanks that move slower but have the same firepower as the normal tanks, except they take three shots to kill, and then there are even tougher tanks that take five shots to destroy and have wall-destroying flame shots that you can’t even cancel out until you’ve hit them twice. There are the aforementioned fast-moving jeeps, and there are tanks that rapid-fire, which you do not want to end up facing head-on when you can help it. Finally, there are the Tomahawk Tanks, which take eight hits to destroy, fire pairs of missiles off that are twice as strong as normal shots, and, unlike the rapid-fire tanks, don’t let you know that they’re about to fire, meaning you want to be in front of them when they’re shooting rounds even less than the rapid-fire tanks.

Not everything is destructible in the maze, but quite a bit is. Buildings and bricks impede both you and enemies, but can be destroyed with four regular shots. Gray and blue stones show up in boss fights, and are used less for maze creation than as a buffer between you and bosses. Think of it like the bricks in games like Breakout: eventually, those will all be knocked away, except instead of exposing the top of the playing area to your attacks, it’s you who’s now exposed. The blue ones are stronger than the gray, by the way, but are not the strongest walls out there. Those would be the steel, which are indestructible unless you’re at max firepower. You can’t wear those down like the gray and blue: you need to obliterate them with only the heaviest shots you can manage.

There are completely non-destructible terrain types, too, such as the jungles meant to obscure your view of enemies traveling through it, and the water tiles used to keep you and bosses separated — those bosses travel horizontally at the top of the playing area, basically as tanks on rails, firing off their huge and numerous guns as they pass by. You’ll need to shoot those guns directly in order to damage those massive tanks, which is easier said than done sometimes given the small window you have to shoot at them in safety.

Tank Force features 36 stages, and while the points you accumulate don’t matter for extends, they do hold some value when playing cooperatively, as far as being able to point to yourself as the best goes. Each completed stage gets a colored flag on it corresponding to the color of the tank that had the best showing, and the player with the most flags after all 36 stages is completed is named the MVP, as well. It’s just bragging rights, sure, but in something cooperative like this, it’s nice to be able to throw a little bit of competition in, no? It’s okay to be annoyed at your friend who keeps shooting you, though. Friendly fire isn’t a thing, in terms of damage or death, but you can still briefly stun your co-op pals and push them backward with your rounds.

One wrinkle that forces you to work together, even as you strive to one-up your pals, is that, regardless of how many extra lives you might have at a given time, the destruction of your base brings on instant failure. Which means it’s absolutely worth sacrificing a life to avoid this outcome, since your lives really only count for how many times you can be shot before needing to insert another credit, whereas the true failure state is the loss of what you’re supposed to be defending. It’s an easier pill to swallow when you aren’t feeding quarters into a machine, at least, but given you should still be striving to do the best possible job — points might not get you extra lives, no, but online leaderboards exist in the present — it’s still going to sting a bit to have to throw yourself into a situation you might not come out of unscathed. Whatever it takes to keep the base standing, though.

Tank Force, being an arcade game, isn’t particularly lengthy. It’ll take you about 40-45 minutes to get through all 36 stages, if you keep feeding credits in as needed and making progress instead of having to constantly restart due to losing said base. There are four different difficulty levels, however, and getting to the point where you can succeed without having to constantly pop in another credit is going to take a lot longer than 45 minutes. It’s a real good time, however, and one I’ll be returning to for more co-op fun with the family in the future. You should similarly give it a shot if you’ve got someone else to play with, because the appeal will be immediately evident once you do.

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