Panzer Panic

While they might look like nothing more than scruffy scrawls, our doodles often represent the most direct outpouring of our imaginations.

We’ve all sat in boring meetings, lessons, or waiting rooms with nothing but a pen and paper to keep us occupied. The kind of deranged creations that emerge can be baffling, worrying, and even inspiring when looked at later on.

Panzer Panic takes the kind of doodled tanks you’d expect to find in your average 11-year-old boy’s maths book and pitches them into heated turn-based battle on your mobile.

Unlike the Android version we covered earlier in the year, Panzer Panic on mobile places you in direct control of your three tanks. You view it all from the top down, and you have to manoeuvre your biro-blue war machines within range of your red foes (controlled either by a computer or a fellow human thanks to the single-handset multiplayer mode) before switching to turret control and letting rip.

You can switch between your tanks freely and easily using the ‘*’ key, but every move you make drains a portion of a shared ink bar that doesn’t replenish until your next turn (unless you pick up the refill powerup). Hence you don’t want to waste too much ink moving – you want to save it for the dirty business of shooting stuff.

Once you’ve switched to turret control your tank freezes in place and you must use the D-pad to direct a crosshair toward your foe. Pressing ‘okay’ starts a bar moving, and you must stop the cursor in the highlighted zone to score a successful hit and maximise the damage done.

It has to be said that this bar system is rather unusual and not entirely successful. It robs the game of the pace, skill and simple sense of knockabout fun that the touchscreen versions possess in abundance. Surely a Worms-style press-and-hold firing system would have been preferable here.

Another area the game suffers in is the size of the screen. While the graphics are extremely accomplished - simple but brilliantly convincing - it all feels a little too cluttered and claustrophobic. It badly needs a ‘zoom out’ button, as you don’t tend to see your opponents until you’re right on top of them (despite the off-screen indicators), again robbing the game of a vital sense of skill.

It’s not exactly an accomplished conversion, then, but Panzer Panic on mobile might prove to be a reasonably fun alternative to doodling when you next encounter a boring meeting, lesson, or waiting room.