IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Total Tank Simulator in About 3 Minutes!
194A detailed review of Total Tank Simulator in about 3 minutes. We make game reviews without the fluff.
Total Tank Simulator is a world war 2 simulator slash strategy game that lets you command your units from above or directly take control of them on the battlefield in 3rd or first person view, which at first might sound pretty cool, but unfortunately it falls short on just about every aspect of all that.
It promises massive battles where you can play as one of six faction including France, Germany, Poland, the UK, USA and USSR, and they each have a full campaign with a few different game modes such as wave, VIP and deathmatch.
It's also got a research tree, some cut scenes with limited voice acting and a wide array of nation specific units including tanks, aircraft, infantry and even some secret weapons like the alleged german anti-gravity weapon 'Die Glocke' or The Bell.
Now i'm all for simple, polygon style graphics when they're done properly and it can often result in a game that looks as good after 10 years as it did at launch, but Total Tank Sim just looks ugly and outdated and for some reason every vehicle, whether it's a tank or a plane, sounds like a Ford Transit van idling at max revs.
The units themselves look good and there's alot of attention to detail in each model, but when you decide to color every aspect of a tank or a plane either blue or red it's going to cheapen the overall feel of the game and I can't help but think that instead of looking fun and cute, it just turned out looking cheap and nasty, and that goes for the terrain too, with barely any details except for some low res clumps of grass and some trees scattered around the map.
What makes it worse is the poor performance. Even on the lowest settings my fps occasionally dipped into the 20's as the game tried to load the totally unecessary terrain deformation caused by a he-111 dropping its load somewhere on the map.
Everytime a new wave of enemies spawns on the map there's a slight stutter as it loads the new units on the battlefield despite said units all looking like an untextured work in progress.
I ended up turning the graphics down to Simple which is the lowest setting and it helped a little bit but after reading many posts online all complaining about the performance I think overall the game is just in need of some massive optimization.
The mouse & keyboard controls are incredibly clunky too. In first person mode the handling either feels overly-sensitive or completely dull and the hit recognition was abit hit and miss if you don't mind the pun.
To make it all worse, the strategic elements of the game are practically non-existant. You start each map by placing your units from the deck with a maximum budget allowed for both each side.
Then if you're on the offensive you're able to issue orders to your units and this is your only chance to have any control over their actions whatsoever. The orders you can choose from consist of attack, defend, flank left or flank right and then you point them to where you want them to go and that's it.
I quickly found out that it was almost impossible to lose a campaign battle by just spawning a combination of medium and heavy tanks with some air support and a couple of artillery on the backline and just telling everything to rush the main objective, and so the campaign became far too easy and more about going through the motions rather than actually have to consider strategies and having fun defeating the enemy.
Your units can be damaged by friendly landmines too and since you have no way to manually tell them to avoid them, you just have to watch helplessly as your tanks drive endlessly over your own mines.
Aswell as the campaign there's a sandbox and shadow mode, and although shadow mode, which forces you to fight against the army you won with in the last round for as long as you can could be quite fun it isn't enough to save the rest of the game.
I also found an annoying bug where after placing my units and hitting start, the menu would freeze in place and no units were able to move, resulting in me having to surrender and atleast twice having to restart the entire campaign because of the limited number of tries allowed.
All of this stuff i've mentioned could be forgiven if it was an early access game in active development but it's a fully released title with a price tag of 19.99 euros and sadly nothing that I experienced while playing would lead me to recommend it to anyone.
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