The enemies get tougher as the game progress but you have a few tricks up your sleeve to keep your armor together. You can upgrade your tank by using upgrade points you receive for destroying certain objects, as well as a reward that you receive when the mission stats are tallied up at the end of each level. Your tank can be armed with rockets, smoke bombs, mines, a shield regenerator and a speed boost to get you out of tight spots. You also have the ability to call for Titans, huge hulking behemoths that stomp on anything that gets in their way. To use these abilities, you need to collect shards, little diamonds that are scattered when enemy tanks are destroyed. Unfortunately unless you spend time purposely going around collecting as many shards as you can, you’ll use up the shards you collect from defeated enemies along the way on either healing up during battle or speeding up the snail trail to the next objective.

To help switch things up over the course of the 20 missions, not all of them take place in your tank. There are a few missions that will see you exit your tank and progress on foot. These missions will have you sprinting in short bursts and strolling along leisurely the rest of the time while you wait to regain your stamina. While tanks and giant “worms” are after you, you have a handy healing device in the form of a shield that gives you some semblance of a chance to make it through to your goal unscathed.

The storyline is something that may be a little out there and confusing at times, but the developer did a decent job with the script, although there are no voice-overs to be found other than alerts. The music is one of the strong points, with its techno style beats that kick in when action starts to get intense. Hearing the music suddenly kick in when you grab the key during a CTF match and you are high tailing it back to your base was a pleasant and unexpected plus.

While the gameplay is interesting at its core, with only the single player and a skirmish mode included, a multiplayer tank battle mode would have been an awesome and more than welcome addition. Tank Universal may have its issues with level design and some tank operating decisions but given the price tag of a measly ten bucks, it won’t break the bank to try out a game with some rough edges and appealing features.

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