Game:

Battle City (1985)

Category:

Review

Duration: 1:01:09

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INTRODUCTION:
You are controlling a tank and must destroy all the enemy tanks in each level. The enemies enters the playfield from the top of the screen. The enemies are trying to get to your base at the bottom of the screen, if they break down the wall and enter the base it is Game Over. If you get hit by enemy fire you will lose a life. Levels are completed when all 20 enemy tanks is destroyed. The game has 35 different stages and each stage contains different types of terrain and obstacles.

The game also features power ups:
-Bomb: Destroys all enemy tanks
-Shield: Makes the tank invulnerable to attack for a limited period of time
-Shovel: Adds steel walls around your base for a period of time, and also repairs damage on the wall
-Star: This improves your tank, and there is different kind of upgrades.
-Tank: Extra life
-Clock: Makes the enemy tanks stand still for a while

REVIEW:
Battle City is from 1985 and is considered as true classic of the video gaming era. It is very easy to pick up because the gameplay is so simple everybody can understand it: Protect your base and destroy all the enemies. But it still has enough challenge to keep it addictive because of the 35 levels. At the beginning you can choose to play whichever level you want, and if that is not enough the game has a build-in level creator so you can make your own levels. The game also features a multiplayer mode where two players can play at the same time!

And does all this look good on the ZX Spectrum? -Oh yeah, indeed it does! This is a 100% true to the original demake for the Speccy 128k. It has all 35 levels, all the power ups, multiplayer mode and the level creator.

This version playes really well, it is fast and smooth, the controls are tight and the AI for the enemies is actually better than in the original. The enemy tanks are moving nice around the whole screen and are quite unpredictable in the changing of direction and use of firepower, so watch out!

Some minusses are that in the levels where there is ice, the ice is made with cyan lines on black background, to make it look as close to the original as possible, but this causes color clash, and it would have looked better if the ice had been made of cyan attribute blocks without lines, then the color clash could have been avoided. The sound is exactly the same as in the NES version, but not as good - I think it could have been done better. An ending would also have been nice, after completing level 35 the game just loops, but the conversion is off course just being true to the original.

A lot of other Battle City clones saw the light of day in the mid 90s, but most of these, if not all, were trd versions and can only run on the trd disc system. Those were all clones and none of them had all the original levels and they did not run like the original, which is also fine because then we got a lot of new Battle City games, but if you would like the original game in a ZX Spectrum version, running from a tap file, so it can run on all the 128k, then look no further - This is it!

Rating = 92%.

The game was made by Epsilon in 1996 but never released. It was recovered, improved and released in 2016. You can download the game here:
Tap: http://zx-pk.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=56642&d=1459201300
Trd: http://zx-pk.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=56641&d=1459201295

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