No Man’s Land (Arcade)
Early arcade games can sometimes have development stories almost as interesting as their gameplay, but if you look at the U.S. release of No Man’s Land it doesn’t seem to have anything worth sharing. The Japanese release a year earlier however has a more intriguing situation surrounding its existence. Known as Sengoku no Jieitai in Japan, its name is fairly close to the movie Sengoku Jieitai that was released in Japanese cinemas that very same year. Both the game and the movie feature military theming, but the film features a group of Japanese soldiers and their equipment transported far into the past to fight warriors of that time while the arcade game focuses solely on tank combat in what seems like the present day. With only one tank even appearing in the movie it might be a case where the name’s lined up coincidentally or the game’s publisher wanted to piggyback off the name of an upcoming film, but whatever the reason it did at least lead to a bit of pondering over game history in the present day.
No Man’s Land, as mentioned before, is a tank game, the action taking place on a single screen where the environment is consistent across every round. A bent brick wall sits at the bottom, two trees are a bit higher than that, some blue rectangles with moving water in them are meant to represent a river that has two small bridges over it, and at the very top of the play area are a long line of parking spaces for inactive enemy tanks to rest until they’re needed. The player starts near the bottom of the screen and every inch of this screen will end up becoming relevant as a small group of enemy tanks positioned around the river are ready to try and blast the player’s tank to smithereens. Your recourse is naturally to blow them apart first, but depending on the round, the amount of backup tanks and the number of enemy tanks active at one time will increase. Enemy cannons fire a bit further than your own so making good use of the trees for cover and trying to avoid getting boxed in by incoming tanks becomes key to survival, but there’s a bit more going on than merely trying to eliminate every enemy who comes your way.
While the opposing tanks have a reach advantage in terms of how far their shells fly, your tank has the unique ability to aim diagonally. Your movement is tied to the way you’re pointing and you can’t actually move diagonally so you might do a little bit of an awkward shuffle as you point in the desired direction, but this does give you the option to wait around the corners of cover to try and take out tanks that can’t target you. In some situations this can confuse the enemy forces as they become unsure how to approach even though there is no true area on the screen where you can completely guard all areas of approach, but it does expand your ability to fight back against uneven odds. As more tanks are wiped out though, the background music will begin to hasten, matching the increased speed at which your enemies now move. Effectively leading them around the screen, shooting when it feels safe, and making sure you aren’t flanked end up making the later parts of a round surprisingly electric. All tank fire needs to hit a tank’s body so tread shots fly by harmlessly, this meaning you also need to line up a shot pretty well to eliminate opponents while also putting yourself at risk since you need to be fairly close to land that hit, a sense of danger added to each attempted shot that isn’t making use of those situational diagonal attacks.
The gradual increase in speed is also made more intimidating by the fact the opposing tanks are smarter than one might expect. If you’re lingering in place waiting for them to move into the path of your shot they might take little half steps or fire a shot to make you think they were about to enter the line of fire, and if you waste time waiting for this tricky tank to actually finally shuffle into the path of your cannon, its allies might have worked their way around to harass you from other angles. At the same time, that need for shots to hit you square on to kill also means you can sometime be surrounded on all sides and slip your way through in an exciting escape. Tanks can even be blocked with your body if you’re felling particularly adventurous, placing part of your tank in the path of a foe trying to take a corner able to stick them in place safely so long as not too much of your main body is in their cannon’s path. Finding out all the little simple tricks that you can perform or can be used against you leads to some unexpected depth in a game that at first seems pretty simple, but that back row of tanks waiting for their turn to fight expands things even further.
If you can manage to work your way around the active tanks and open fire on the ones still sitting in place, you’ll earn double the points you’d acquire for blowing apart an active one. This is no doubt done because of the risk involved in trying to get around tank groups that usually range from four to seven and will have any destroyed tank immediately lead to one coming to life and leaving its parking spot, but if you can pull off the trip across the river you can obliterate the reserves for huge points. On default cabinet settings you can earn one extra life on top of your starting set of three once your score is high enough, but for the most part this is a game about trying to score as high as you can while also making continued survival across rounds feel like a bit of progress thanks to the enemy numbers increasing each stage up to a point. Whether you’re aiming for the extra score or just wanting to make the fight go faster the tactic of targeting the parking lot is still a bold but profitable one if you can execute it safely, but this parking area still adds a bit more variability to the action since you can’t be quite sure where in the waiting batch of tanks a replacement will emerge. You might try to kill a tank or two to try and clear the bridge to head over to the inactive tanks only for those in front of you to spring to life, but it may also be the ones waiting on the far edges of the row and you may have some time to blast a few tanks before you run off. By pairing this unpredictability with the slight intelligence shown in how some tanks pursue you, rounds of No Man’s Land end up creating some suitably different scenarios even within the boundaries of reusing the same battlefield every battle.
THE VERDICT: Rather than being just a tank game about shooting other tanks, a back row of enemies waiting to rush in and the option to clear out their ranks adds an extra layer to how a player approaches No Man’s Land. Even if you never take the risk of going after them, they still roll out in ways that shift your battlefield considerations, the enemies already moving in interesting ways to make taking them out less straightforward than waiting for them to move into your cannon’s path. A few little skews caused by things like diagonal aiming on your end but far-reaching shots on the opposing side pair well with a battlefield design where there’s no truly safe spot to hide. The opposing tanks aren’t always smart but their moments of cleverness lead to unpredictable excitement despite the simple concept at the game’s heart.
And so, I give No Man’s Land for arcade machines…
A GOOD rating. A few small choices go a long way in No Man’s Land design. Were the enemy tanks consistent in behavior you could possibly outsmart them and always pull off tricks like sitting around a corner, but you can never be sure if an opponent is going to drive right into your cannon’s path, attempt to flank you, or even psych you out with feinted movement. The speed increase means things get more heated over the course of the round, but it’s the unexpected angles a newly activated tank might take that ensure you can never find a spot of absolute safeness. Wiping out that back row is not only rewarding in the point value associated with it but it also thins out some of the potential dangers you’d face if you had only focused on tanks that are moving around, but getting back to them is never too easy. Your actions end up holding a fair bit of sway over how things unfold since each tank destroyed will lead to another joining the fray until they’re all wiped out. Wipe out everything on the south side of the river and you can maybe try to pick off the next tanks before they cross the river, but then you have no hope of hitting any of the parked ones since that side is packed with peril. Let them reach the trees and brick wall and you’ll have more room to maneuver around and use cover in the fight, potentially even allowing you to lure the tanks down below before you dash off to clear out their reserves. Rounds end up rarely feeling exactly the same and the shot distances for you and your enemy ensure some challenge is always present as you need to get in closer to make sure your attacks land, so while the design is certainly one that could be evolved with more battlefields or enemy types, No Man’s Land made remarkable use of very few variables.
A survival challenge, a game with easily understand chances for earning an even higher score, and battles that remain tough but navigable due to a healthily skewed balance make No Man’s Land a surprisingly strong tank game that thrives on smart design decisions alone. However, No Man’s Land ended up a fairly obscure arcade title, failing to catch fire possibly because of its unremarkable presentation and history. People who entered arcades in 1980 would also see Battlezone with its 3D battlefield and distinct periscope view screen and be drawn to its novelty while No Man’s Land leaned on honest entertaining play and little else. Perhaps if it had truly been some movie tie-in it could have drawn some attention towards it, but instead No Man’s Land looks like just another tank game despite having a good handle on how to make such play fun.