My Little Tank

Tanks aren’t little. They’re great big brutish things, incapable of looking cute even when some protester has stuck a flower in the gun barrel. You wouldn’t want a little tank, unless it was really little of course – small enough to be injected into an evil dictator’s bloodstream to wage war from within. That would be cool.

However, there’s no disputing that the tank in iPhone game My Little Tank is, indeed, little. It’s smaller than your fingernail, as are all the enemy tanks you have to blow up with it.

You take your tank through 80 top-down levels, shooting at enemies, destroying their bases, and sometimes defending your own base too. It fires automatically, so you need only to concern yourself with movement. You can touch the screen to move, swipe your tank with your finger, move around by tilting your iPhone, or use a virtual D-pad to control it. The tilt method is the first one you’ll abandon, but you should be able to find one of the other three that suits you.

Like any war, My Little Tank is about positioning yourself to shoot enemy tanks before they shoot you. Limited variation in enemy forces encourages you to change up your tactics to defeat the tougher tanks. There’s also s range of power-ups to help you through, boosting your speed, health or gun, earning you an extra life, or even destroying every nearby tank in one fell swoop.

It’s hard to get fired up about My Little Tank, though. It feels too much like a smartphone port, hardly designed with a focus on making it feel natural to iPhone. It's easy to imagine a really cool top-down tank game that employs two virtual analogue sticks in the bottom corners of the screen – one for movement and one for shooting – for example. That, however, is exactly what My Little Tank is not.

Instead, it delivers an antiquated mix of shortcomings and mediocre action. Take the insistence on restricting movement to four directions (you can't move diagonally). Even more, you can only shoot in the direction you face. As much as we know about military armaments, we're certain tanks can fire independently from their direction of movement.

Another niggle is the way that once you lose all your lives, it’s back to level one next time. We can’t understand why there’s no option to restart on the level you died on and go from there.

You can have some fun with My Little Tank, but with so much high-quality competition on the App Store, letting frustrations like these through makes it very much a B-List iPhone game.