For this week's iPhone Friday i tried Tank Pack Attack from Fattoy Game Technology on my iPhone14Pro.
There are a lot of merge styles games on phones. many have you combine items to make a new item. i'm seeing more games that have taken that merge mechanic and applied it to levelling troops. in both instances, there's often a large play area so there are a lot of things to merge. with Tank Pack Attack the space to place items and troops is much smaller and requires a little strategy and luck.
The tutorial at the start is quite good. it goes step by step explaining how to play the game and takes you through your first run of the game. when the run ends, it continues by explaining what to do with the loot you got. once things are leveled up, it's back to do another run. it's a simple enough routine and as you can play this game one handed Tank Pack Attack is a decent game to play whilst commuting. the problem is that the loot you get is quite slim and the amount you need to upgrade means you may have to do 5 runs to upgrade something from level 1 to 2. i remarked whilst playing that the game's economy doesn't feel quite balanced.
One issue is that whilst the game has a good tutorial for the gameplay side, it failed to point me to the daily achievements and the rewards you get from doing them. had i known earlier in the video about it, i would've been less frustrated with the game's economy. but i didn't know about it until right at the end and so for me it felt unbalanced.
There's one more thing about Tank Pack Attack that felt noticeably bad and that's the quality of the audio. as someone who grew up in the MiniDisc and MP3 era, i'm familiar with low bit rate music and in this game it sounded like it was 64kbps at best! i'd recommend turning the music off, it sounded far to rough to enjoy.
It's unfortunate that these two issues are as big as they are as the game was fun to play. i wanted to see more, but i would've had to grind several runs to level up items to progress to the next area. Tank Pack Attack uses an energy system, but doesn't say how long it'd take to recharge it, so there's always the chance i'd run out of energy trying to get to the next area. Tank Pack Attack is fine for the daily commute. the little and often approach would probably work well with this game.
Version 1.2 Played
