Born for Wii: BattleTanx: Global Assault (page 2)
Global Assault is set in the year 2006, which was way in the future back in the late 90s. As a result, war has ravaged the world thanks to the chaos caused by a lethal virus that wiped out 99.9% of the female population. Talk about a bummer.
Our story focuses on Griffin Spade and his wife Madison, one of the select few women remaining on Earth. There's some mysticism here about the power of the Edge and some magical mumbo-jumbo, but the driving force of the narrative is that a thoroughly evil Queenlord runs off with Griffin's kid, which is the perfect excuse to hop in a tank and travel across the country blowing up all kinds of stuff. In a nutshell, the story's pretty terrible, and the presentation is nothing to write home about, either. Still, for a game about tanks, it manages to take place in a pretty cool post-apocalyptic world with a nice twist on the formula that definitely has potential for expansion.
The single-player game lasts a respectable 18 levels across the U.S. and Europe. It gets even better for the multiplayer, which supports the single-player levels and several more dedicated maps, bringing the grand total of playable arenas up around the two dozen mark. Now that's variety!
In the end, BattleTanx is fun simply because it's all about destruction. And there are so many ways to destroy things. Each tank in the game has a primary weapon, and secondary weapons scattered throughout the maps can be picked up and cycled through to be used at the appropriate time. The selection of tanks is also impressive: the M1A1 Abrams is middle-of-the-road in terms of speed, armor, and firepower, and will generally be the game's default tank. It's well complemented by the overpowered, heavily-armored Goliath and smaller tanks like the Flippy and the Mototank. The list is filled out by flame tanks, missile tanks, hovertanks, laser tanks, and more, each with advantages and disadvantages when it comes to speed, stamina, and firepower.
But how 'bout them weapons? Yup, there are a bunch of them, too. Some are your standard powerups like health, radar, and ammo that most multiplayer games necessitate, but several are more inventive and considerably more fun: bouncing betties pop up when enemies are nearby and release a storm of lasers, and the guided missile can actually be controlled after you launch it. The cloak, turbo, and teleport powerups all do what you'd expect, and the turbo, especially, can be a riot to use, sending a tank flying pell-mell across the map. Mines? Check. Grenades? Check. Flamethrower? Check. And let's not forget the nuke, which creates a shockwave of destruction across the entirety of smaller maps and is powerful enough to outright obliterate weak or damaged tanks.
