“I’M IN UR TANK KILLIN UR GUYS!!!!”

Hovertanks is a Battlezone style first person tank game that lets you zoom around a (and I use the term loosely) 3d environment, similar to old snes games that attempted 3d areas without the use of the mode 7 capabilities.Considering that this is not true 3d and that all the sprites had to be rendered at multiple perspectives, the artwork in this game isn’t too bad, but not as pretty as other modern web games by any means.

The sound is pretty weak and doesn’t help to immerse you in any way, but it’s not terrible or completely unfitting.

The gameplay is pretty standard for any first person game, arrows or WASD to drive, mouse to aim/shoot/change weapons. The fun is in the way the tanks handle. Being over tanks you never just stop or turn you always have momentum and drift so you can do some pretty cool evasive maneuvers when you are in a firefight with enemy tanks. I had the most fun charging the tank’s cannon and doing 180’s to take out guys on my six.

Where this game suffers is the framerate. Because of all the 3d calculations it has running, and possible due to some inefficient programming, the game runs a bit slow as it is, wich is made even more apparent by the extremely low framerate the game is running at to begin with. I’m pretty sure most older PCs would choke on this game, but if you got a powerhouse it’s still a fun game…. for about 10 minutes.

Still, it’s nice to see people pushing flash games beyond the 2d and single perspective 3d we’ve been seeing. Maybe other programmers will find inspiration and take this concept to the next level and give us a much cooler game to review.

[ Play Hovertanks ]