War of the Human Tanks – Review (PC)

War of the Human Tanks – Review (PC)

The main thing that I can take away from War of the Human Tanks is that it is not a game to be taken seriously.

It’s almost like an interactive anime in some respects, complete with a montage of Japanese towns and landscapes with a J-Pop song over the top before each “episode”. If you enjoy anime, you will probably get a good laugh out of the story and understand all the tropes in the discourse (which features such golden lines as “Please dieeeeee!” and “I will definitely make you eat dirt.”). There is a massive amount of (thankfully skip-able) dialogue though, and none of it is voice acted so you’d better have your reading glasses close to hand if you want in on the passable plot.

Shock tanks are essentially suicide bombers. Creepy...
Shock tanks are essentially suicide bombers. Creepy…

The story itself is fairly standard Advance Wars-esque stuff, but with more pronounced anime tropes for characters. There is the “Tiny Tyrannical Girl”, the officer sent to whip you into shape, and the “Idiot Savant” younger sister (I’m going to assume the character is female because the vast majority of the non-high authority characters in the game are female), who is freakishly good at mechanical engineering. Come to think of it, most of the characters in the story are female, including the titular human tanks you will be sending to their oh-so-kawaii deaths. Human tank is a bit of a misnomer though; they are actually sentient human-looking robots with little or no free will. There is a little bit on the ethics of this, but it is mostly thrown out or laughed off by the characters, which is a shame as I would have liked to have seen it extrapolated. Then again, as I said, this isn’t a serious game.

The mechanics of the game are where things get really interesting and are probably the highlight of the game. Before each mission, you can create new human tanks using “crates”, which are the main resource in the game. You can then fit them with modules to make them better at certain things, deploy them onto the map and start the mission. Missions take place on a hex based map with fog of war. You can fire randomly into unknown squares all Battleships-like to try and score a lucky hit on any lurking enemies, but the best way to go about things is to use a recon tank to scout them out. This promotes a diverse force composition instead of encouraging you to spam just one kind of unit. When I said “hex based”, you probably imagined a turn based game. This actually isn’t the case. Battles take place in real time, but each unit has a cooldown period between each action. This pressures on the player to get things done and adds logistical difficulty to fielding a larger force as you can only issue one order at a time. I’m not certain that this was an intended feature, but it certainly feels flavourful.

The human tanks are pretty much robot slaves.
The human tanks are pretty much robot slaves.

The most glaring omission from the game has to be the lack of multiplayer. Some of the game mechanics (such as tiles that the enemy fires into becoming highlighted) lend themselves very well to player versus player and it seems like a bit of a waste that this has not been utilised. It’s much like playing chess against one of those fancy robots; the satisfaction of defeating the AI is not the same as when beating another human and it doesn’t take a huge amount of time to figure out how the blasted thing thinks.

The other problem is that the game turns into quite a slog. After a while, the battles do get boring and there aren’t enough interesting features from stage to stage to sustain interest. If the story wasn’t so uninteresting, that might be enough to warrant completion. To be clear, the problem doesn’t lie with the story itself, but more with the plot being buried under lines and lines of exposition for the sake of anime in-jokes which will inevitably alienate anyone who doesn’t ‘get’ them. Admittedly, it does cater rather well to its intended audience.

While there is some fun to be had with War of the Human Tanks, the enjoyment doesn’t last very long, especially if you aren’t familiar enough with Japanese cultural tropes to find the script funny. The lack of multiplayer is also harmful to the longevity of the game. What we are left with is a very niche title that misses opportunities all over the place and provides a modest amount of entertainment at best.

Pros

+ Innovative ideas for gameplay mechanics

+ Caters well to its niche audience

Cons

– Devolves into another grind-fest

– No multiplayer despite goodness of fit

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
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