Tank Command (Atari 7800)

Tank Command is the first Atari 7800 game I have ever played, a game I selected for that honor because it had a few things seemingly going for it. Tank Command is an Atari 7800 exclusive so it should be a good fit for the system, it is a vertically scrolling tank game so it didn’t seem like it would be too unusual, and it sounded like a short experience due to only having three levels. What had seemed like a fitting first pick on paper soon revealed itself to potentially be the worst possible pick, because despite its deceptive simplicity, there is a lot that doesn’t work in what should have been a pretty easy to design game.

Tank Command has you piloting a tank into an enemy’s heavily fortified territory to try and grab their flag, the manual stating they’re throwing everything they’ve got at you to halt your advance. It certainly isn’t kidding either, as Tank Command is a game absolutely cluttered with enemy encampments, vehicles, and weaponry, all of these threatening your rather slow and unexceptional tank. You can move in eight directions, your cannon always facing the way your moving, and while this does give you the ability to fire at enemies on different parts of the screen, having to move even a little towards an enemy who is moving towards you and firing shots at the same time means some foes aren’t really an option to fire back at. To complicate things further, your tank’s gun has an energy meter on the bottom right of the screen, this filled by holding down the left button on your controller. Depending on the energy in the bar, your shot will fly a certain distance, a full bar firing it far ahead and a nearly empty one dropping it pretty close to the front of your tank. Attempting to use this strategically is a losing battle because of how many enemies are constantly moving around and how easy it is to undershoot or overshot your intended destination, so the successful strategy seems to be to completely ignore this mechanic and set your shot to a close range one so you can get used to that over time.

Learning how to maneuver your slow tank and utilize its shot while ignoring the energy meter amidst constant bombardment is already a tedious and unrewarding process before you factor in the limitations placed on you. Your tank starts with full fuel and 50 tank shells, but the fuel depletes gradually over time and every shot costs a bit of ammo to execute. Your tank will be immediately destroyed by any shot that hits it or any contact made with anything save a foot soldier or piece of the environment, so you can’t just try to plow your way through enemy forces, your ammo reserves gradually depleting as you fight to survive. This is one reason trying to mess with the energy meter only serves to harm you in the long run, but with some enemies like the pillboxes requiring multiple shots to destroy and others like enemy tanks requiring a well-aimed shot to kill, you can have ammo woes unless you make a note of where you can get some refills. Fuel being an unnecessary timer forces aggression out of you though, the player needing to plunge into enemy territory to avoid being stuck in place with no gas. This can also be refilled by finding the right pickup, but the most likely way you’ll be receiving ammo and fuel refills is by dying.

Tank Command gives you 7 lives to start with, something that seems generous for a three level game until you realize how long and brutal these levels are. Enemy tanks will appear from all sides of the screen, sometimes boxing you into an unwinnable situation where you just have to accept your tank is dead. Pillboxes will fire at you from afar to cut off escape routes as well, and while the jeeps and soldiers that run across are mild by comparison, any additional danger added to the rapidly crowded screen makes it harder to maneuver your clunky tank around. The game is definitely hoping you’ll play again and again to memorize the spawn locations of these enemies, but to mess with you even if you have a good feeling for where tanks appear, there are occasional bombs that drop down from above, falling so fast you barely have time to react to their sudden appearance. These are always dropped directly towards you but not necessarily directly onto you, so even if you try to dodge them, you might have the unfortunate luck of either moving into its actual drop path or into one of the other dangers you were trying to deal with before it appeared. To complicate matters further, missile silos are added in level 2, these firing a missile up into the air that briefly disappears before dropping down towards your current location similar to the bombs. These can and will fire at you in tandem with the bombs and as tanks come at you from behind and fire before they’re even really visible on screen, making it hard to decide at any moment what can be viewed as a safe action, all while a fuel meter tells you not to sit around and think about it.

The three levels of Tank Command are really just a segmented vertical stretch of orange dirt punctuated by some mountains, trees, pillboxes, and buildings. You can destroy buildings in a futile search for a high score in this game you likely won’t complete, these of course requiring you to waste precious ammo to destroy. A victorious run pretty much asks for conservative use of any resource on top of memorization and luck. If you lose all your lives you do have to start from the beginning so the level segmentation is just to indicate things are getting harder, but there is another complication to the game’s design that really feels like an unnecessary rotten cherry on top. The manual warns of invisible “Tank Traps” that you won’t see until you’ve found yourself in one, requiring the player to reverse their vehicle to find another way around. These are not a true gameplay feature though, but the manual trying to excuse moments where it seems like you should be able to drive through the area ahead but can’t because an invisible wall is blocking you. These are often adjacent to structures and environmental objects so these obstructions are likely just wider than their visual component suggests, but rather than making it clear you can’t drive to the side of these objects, the game lets you get yourself into a situation where you will likely die as something takes advantage of the situation. Even worse, when you do die, your new tank appears right where the previously destroyed one was, meaning you can be thrown back into a still deadly situation to continue to lose tanks until you break free somehow.

Honestly, things like the ammo and fuel limitations aren’t really felt compared to the major problems with death and enemy placement. The game tries to make its small amount of uninteresting content last longer by bombarding you with foes you don’t have the time to properly react to. Objects in the game are far too large, your tank a huge target and the enemies easily filling up most of the screen even when there are only three or four around. This made all the worse by how much a single building’s presence restricts movement options with its dominating size. There’s rarely any respite to be found, and your only equalizer is a weapon that has pointless restrictions tied to its proper use. This game is difficult not because it places down a challenging design you can learn and overcome. It’s difficult because everything added to the game is deliberately designed in some way to further impede the player and lessen their chances of capturing the enemy flag.

THE VERDICT: Tank Command uses every single part of its design to try and keep you from finishing its three dull and overstuffed levels, and if you do manage to win, it’s made sure you didn’t enjoy the tedious memorization required to overcome the problems in its deceptively basic design. Your own shots are limited in too many ways, enemies are constantly thrown in and appear in ways that you might not be able to react to, and the play area is constantly facing issues with invisible walls, enemies firing from offscreen, and far too little real estate to effectively react to everything in your path. Tank Command is an abysmal attempt to create a hard game, but it achieves it high difficulty by failing at almost every mechanic it has included.

And so, I give Tank Command for Atari 7800…

An ATROCIOUS rating. The fact something as restrictive as the fuel and ammo system is offset by the fact you’ll be dying so often you won’t often run out is pretty much the best way of showing that Tank Command’s systems don’t really gel at all. Your tank is a cumbersome way of interacting with a world too fast and aggressive for it to handle, many moments existing where you can screw yourself over because you moved into an area that you had no indication would soon be impossible to escape safely. The bombs dropping from above are one of the most egregious offenders in restricting your movement far too much, and while there are plenty of problems with how enemy tanks approach from offscreen and how crowded the screen can get, removing the falling bombs would at least eliminate one of the cheaper ways to die in a game filled with cheap deaths. Tank Command feels like a game where they realized they would only be able to make three practically identical levels so they stuffed it so full of ways to die that you won’t be able to say you completed the game far too quickly. Instead, you likely won’t complete the game at all because no part of the process is made enjoyable, even your success against enemies feeling like you squeaked by without a random problem finding its way to you during the skirmish. Your ridiculous frailty is definitely one of the worst parts of the title, and since you only have the seven lives and no chance to earn more, it feels like a boost to your durability would allow you to at least suffer the necessary blows that sometimes crop up without them being such a pivotal issue with making any decent progress in the game.

Tank Command is a very bad first impression to have of the Atari 7800, but it has to be awful luck of the draw that lead to me finding this sadistically designed tank game rather than something more pleasant. Developer Froggo Games is apparently infamous for their bad Atari games, the company dissolving shortly after it made its only two Atari 7800 games. Morbid curiosity may draw me to their door again, but now I know the danger I will be dealing with if it does. Tank Command seemed like a game too simple to mess up and yet they failed in most every way they could, the fact the game holds together without glitches and is properly playable being its biggest success amidst a list of failures that is almost indistinguishable from its list of features.