Lil Tanks - Tank Based Indie Mayhem

The Future of Tank Warfare is Very Cute

Best enjoyed with a gamepad

The story of Lil Tanks is the perfect vehicle to drive arcade shmup gameplay. Our quest begins with an alien incursion by the aptly named Curr. The aliens are in search of a new home and have already begun terraforming earth, so that means human personnel can't get the job done, especially with the lack of surplus ww1 gas masks on the market. Time to teach the Curr just what makes mankind so dangerous: the ability to make and use tools. This time it will be the ultimate weapon to evict the dirty space invaders. 

An international think-tank, pun intended, have cooked up the latest in unmanned military vehicles, Lil Tanks. These self-learning AI controlled pairs of tanks have all the latest tech and advancement without the weakness of a fragile human crew. Each Tank drone is paired with a mini tank that serves as the typical shmup drone, hence the name Lil Tanks. The mini tank can also be controlled by a second player for some same-screen action, either way it helps spread the lead on screen with additional firepower. Throughout the games story the Lil tanks can only communicate with Beeps and Boops, though at the story's climax they have a pretty big message. 

The campaign mode for Lil Tanks has players traveling the globe and beyond through seven stages. Exotic locales like Brazil and Mars aren't outside the theater of operations for these bite sized main battle tanks. The scenery may change in color and backdrop, though it doesn't mean any huge changes in terms of gameplay or even enemy variety. The Curr are a pretty uniform group of aliens so they don't have much in terms of variance from one stage to another. There's the occasional environmental hazard that threatens to melt you tank's treads into slag, though at it's core Lil Tanks is still a horizontal shmup. 

Lil tanks auto-scrolls from left to right, typical horizontal shmup design, but instead of something like the typical anime girls, space ships or even cops, this time it's a ground-bound tank that has more firepower than an entire mobile division. There of course is a boss at the end of every stage, a must when you've got only seven stages to complete. What sets Lil Tanks apart from the SNES shmup cart that it tries to look like, is the xp and leveling system. Playing or replaying any stage will reward you with a bounty of xp that can level up both tanks, increasing their base firepower, granted you'll still want to drive over those weapon and speed pickups. 

If the idea of cute little mini tanks tickle your fancy, read this article on tankettes from Wikipedia

Throughout the Lil Tanks campaign, more pairs of lil tanks will unlock, though they don't offer the intuitive utility that you'd expect. The newly added tanks serve as a flavor of newgame+, as they have to be leveled separately and have their own separate campaign progress. Where I'd think that swapping out tank teams to beat the right levels was the point of the variety, instead it's just another way to enjoy progressing through the campaign. Not a terrible feature, but I'm spoiled by games like Earth Defense Force that let you mix and match classes and guns to take on the increasingly insane missions. The only way that the separate campaigns hurt the quality is if you're goal is to reach the max level for all tanks, that'd be too tedious, even for a shooter. 

My opinions of Lil Tanks are net positive. There's a lot of hectic action and the ability to save progress and level up makes it a game to come back to. The satisfaction of obliterating waves of enemy vehicles can't be understated, though maxing the level of every single Lil tank would be far beyond the enjoyment of what's to offer here. I did have a lot of fun with the one play-through and would recommend it on that basis alone. An added to the game is the story's conclusion. at the end of the game, the voiceless tanks choose to walk away from the conflict instead of dealing a genocidal blow to the Curr. What hits hard here is that while mankind made the ultimate fighting machine, the combined work that lead to the AI tanks shows that the net product of human advancement was positive. Something of a pro-human narrative that's lacking in today's media. Pretty wholesome story for a mindless shmup game. Worth playing in my opinion, Comrades. 

Handick hot tips:
Okay, so it's obvious that leveling up by replaying levels with the hardcore modifiers is a good move, but during missions it'd be a huge missed opportunity to limit those weapon pickups to your main tank. Hit the swap button to pick up your next weapon, then you've got two powered up guns instead of one.

Now here's a lesson in trickery, instead of holding the fire button and settling for full auto, mashing the fire button let's you blast faster than full auto, I found that even with the base weapon that this tactic was a game changer, good on the bosses too.