xbox live indie game reviews

If you're looking for a bit of a time warp back to the early days of computing, Tank Strike will take you on that journey and show you just how things have evolved. This game is an artillery-shooter, firmly rooted in the military tradition of calculating weapon trajectories, which started before computer games even had graphics. While its core principles remain the same, this genre, like its real-life ballistic counterparts, has added a few new tricks to its repertoire.

Unlike the early days of Artillery, when a player could choose just power and angle of a standard bomb, Tank Strike offers an excessive number of customization options to prevent gameplay from turning stale. Up to eight players can join any game, with any ratio of human-to-A.I. combatants. If you really like to tweak the gameplay, you can choose from an almost overwhelming amount of options such as: available weapons, cash rewards, level terrain, physics, tank attributes and weapon damage stats. If you'd rather dive into the action quickly, you can hide most of these options by jumping into basic mode, grabbing a few weapons at the store and dropping onto the map so you can start blastin' away. Thankfully, for those of us who love to tinker with the configuration and create custom gametypes, you can save all your settings in one of the ten save slots so they're easily accessible in the future. I'd like to be able to give each gametype a custom name in the save slot (like 'Terminal Velocity', 'Make it HAIL!' or 'Death Showers'), that's a minor gripe at best.

The real bombshell that blows most other artillery games away is the glorious arsenal of 14 weapons and 10 modifiers on display at the store. Be prepared to arm yourself with drifting Parachute Bombs, scattering Cluster Bombs, tunneling Diggers, terraforming Land Shifters and carpeting Flight Bombers from the cache. For more tactical warfare, don't leave home without strategic modifiers like the Low Gravity Bomb, which creates pockets of inverted gravity on the map, or the Vampire Drain Bomb, that sucks a portion of your target's health away and adds it to your Tank's life bar. When you're feeling extra fiendish, toss a Magnet Bomb on your enemy and laugh maniacally as bombs veer off course and careen into him relentlessly (simultaneous twirling of virtual Fu Manchu mustache recommended). The combinations are almost limitless, so there are plenty of ways to arrange your arsenal however you like.

Whether you're an engineer with 20 years of experience in advanced weapons guidance systems locked in a secret bunker plotting surgical strikes, or just some putz on a couch with a few friends looking for some simple, destructive fun, Tank Strike as a nifty way to quench your ballistic bloodlust (and maybe learn some basic trigonometry and physics while you're at it).