Battlezone (Arcade)

There are some arcade games that just don’t play the same without the original hardware. I’d contend that some things like driving games don’t require the immersive driver seat setup to provide the same challenge on a home console, but after its 1980 release, it would take many years for Battlezone’s dual joystick controls to be a standard part of game controllers, meaning most early ports came with inevitable compromises. Some might be superior for the changes they made if what I’ve heard of the Atari 2600 version is true, but the original arcade release feels like much of its appeal is based on its emulation of tank controls, although the periscope found on some arcade cabinets was not only an optional attachment but one many people preferred to do without. The arcade cabinet I found to play did feature a periscope though, meaning I’d get to experience Battlezone in its original intended format.

Battlezone has the player take control of a tank in a large flat area littered with strange geometric shapes. A volcano erupts quietly in the distance as a crescent moon hangs in the sky, the world entirely rendered in lines of green if the overlay is placed on the system or rendered purely as black and white without it. The world is created through vector graphics, a system that draws lines to create shapes without filling them in with colors, meaning every object can be seen through be they barrier or enemy. The player views all of this through the first-person perspective, a then novel way of portraying a shooting game made only more immersive if you find a cabinet with the periscope attachment that limits your field of view to the play area alone. You can also see a few helpful bits of information on your screen like a radar, your score, and amount of remaining lives, but Atari tried their best to make something immersive with the technology of the time while still not hiding vital info from the player.

Controlling the tank is done by way of two joysticks, each one controlling a tread on the tank. Moving them in tandem moves you forward or back appropriately, but moving only the left or right joystick will allow the tank to turn. This fairly faithful form of tank control feels like the main obstacle in Battlezone. An enemy tank will appear when the game begins, the player needing to use the radar and its associated messages on enemy locations to find where they are and open fire with the attack button. The enemy tank can fire back at you as well, meaning movement might be required to avoid their shots. Positioning your tank behind the environmental objects can provide impenetrable cover, and since you can see right through it you can wait for an enemy to approach and then drive out when you’re ready to strike. It only takes one shot for anything to go down in Battlezone, but the tanks you fight near the start aren’t very aggressive or intelligent. Once you get acclimated to them though, they’ll be swapped out for much speedier and aggressive tanks, the fight still about just finding where they are and firing before they fire on you, but the time to do so has been made a bit tighter.

Once you’ve started facing harder tanks, there are only two more enemy types that will be introduced, one being the entirely passive UFO. Most of the enemies spawn in one by one, appearing shortly after the previous foe was destroyed. A UFO will appear while another enemy is present though and poses no threat to the player, not even triggering the radar so they can’t be accused of providing false flags. Instead, if you spot and shoot down this UFO, you’ll get plenty of bonus points, Battlezone being a typical arcade score challenge where the game continues endlessly until you run out of lives. You can earn an extra life at 100,000 points and the weakest tanks provide a base of 1000 points per destroyed vehicle, but even though it gives you 5 lives to start with, Battlezone’s difficulty means they’re pretty easy to lose. Not only do you have to spot tanks before they find you and then fire on them when they’re already likely training their own gun on you, but soon a guided missile foe will enter the picture. Falling in from above and moving erratically and noisily, you have a brief period to fire on them before they’ll hit into you and kill you, and unlike tank fire, you can’t outmaneuver them.

Learning to wrangle your tank provides the initial interesting challenge in Battlezone, the player having to get the hang of the controls to effectively survive. Enemy tanks will fire while offscreen if you don’t act quickly enough, but they can also be baited into needing to turn or placing themselves on the opposite side of a barrier, meaning you can have an advantage by approaching while they have to adjust their movements. However, this is pretty much the limit of strategy in Battlezone, and once you understand the two joysticks well enough, Battlezone loses a lot of its appeal. The gameplay loop boils down to finding the enemy and firing on them, strategic manuevering not even necessary for the game’s hardest enemy, the guided missile. The missile is mainly just about firing when it happens to pass into your onscreen reticle, and even when an enemy tank does have the time to fire first, they aren’t really intelligent enough to lead their shot. Battlezone isn’t easy despite the enemy’s simple behaviors, the main challenge being finding the enemy and reacting before its too late, but that’s all there really is to it. Without the challenge of maneuvering this somewhat slow and awkwardly realistic tank this wouldn’t really be too interesting, and it feels all too simple once you do understand your movement and the enemy types. The learning period isn’t likely to be too fun as you get killed by offscreen threats and adjust your mind, and with only repetition awaiting you once you do get the hang of it, Battlezone ends up being a less than exciting arcade experience.

THE VERDICT: Battlezone’s simplicity isn’t so plain that it ends up awful, but the game does seem to rely on its twin joystick controls to carry a lot of the game’s difficulty. Spinning around in a flat, object-filled plane as you try to locate the latest enemy begins tense but soon becomes rote as you acclimate to the tank’s movement and learn your enemies aren’t too bright. The main dangers are not being able to see the enemy as they open fire or the guided missiles that will require proper micromanagement of your cannon position, but overcoming these doesn’t involve the degree of strategy or variation that would help the constant repeated fights with those enemies remain interesting. Battlezone is about a lot of spinning around and firing at unimaginative wire frame enemies and there’s not enough to that process to keep things fresh or engaging.

And so, I give Battlezone for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. It’s clear what the appeal of Battlezone is meant to be. Rotating around an area where an enemy has suddenly appeared can be a little exciting, that threat of being blasted spurring you to try and find them quickly. The radar simplifies that process quite a bit, but the problem with this being the whole challenge of the game is you quickly get a feel for it. The tank controls aren’t too hard to pick up and while they do remain the limitation that is meant to make the game challenging, getting a feel for the radar and enemy behavior isn’t that difficult either. The game’s difficulty then becomes about whether that enemy will fire before you have the chance to see them and outmaneuver their shots or if you’ll be twitchy enough when a guided missile appears. Battlezone’s too simple in concept for a game that will infinitely continue until you die but the reliance on blind spots and instant deaths means it couldn’t push you much harder with what it has. The guided missile is a good shakeup but just one of the two the game has, and slightly smarter and faster tanks doesn’t really evolve the process of finding them and shooting them enough to sustain the game for long.

A tank is a naturally cumbersome vehicle and as such many games focused on piloting them can feel a bit slow and limited. Battlezone’s attempts to imitate tank combat with what technology it had don’t so much miss the mark as fail to take tank fights in a more interesting direction. Its arcade design no doubt influenced your own fragility to encourage multiple plays, but it mixes together with enemies who hide offscreen to make for a game that feels like a relic of early gaming. Its efforts to bring first person tank combat to the arcade are commendable, but its design isn’t strong enough to make it a timeless arcade classic.