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For quite a lot of its duration, Tank! Tank! Tank! isn't a particularly brilliant video game. It's a simplified spin on Earth Defense Force, which I love, but since EDF is hardly the most complex of enterprises in the first place, paring it back even more leaves you with something that can feel a bit threadbare. Throughout the grindy campaign, you're dropped into a series of bland little arenas and tasked with finishing off hordes of mechanical spiders, dinosaurs, floating heads, sea serpents and the odd ten-storey mammoth, while accidentally bringing any surrounding skyscrapers, boulders and temples down in weightless chunks. The primitive geometry and texture work betray the game's origins as an arcade title, while the targeting reticule is so vast and the lock-on so generous that, for your first few hours at least, you'll rarely have to give much thought to anything as taxing as aiming. The tanks you steadily unlock as you work through the main campaign - either with a local co-op partner or an AI team-mate - come with pleasantly cartoonish weapon attachments, but the different turrets, laser beams and rocket launchers on offer rarely feel particularly exciting to play with, even when you're swapping your main guns out for the more exotic power-ups that drop from your foes. Equally, while you can upgrade each vehicle's stats and pick between a range of classes, the handling is so lifeless that you'll struggle to really care much about the nuances. There's no room for gimmicky Wii U cleverness, either, since the touch-screen is generally used to display unimportant vehicle dials during the heat of battle, or else needed to give one player a specific view of the action during games involving more than one person.
As for the repetitive story mode, the best thing about that - discounting the line, "The lunar base is being attacked by giant eyeballs," which I believe is actually plagiarised from Tolstoy - is that you can use the GamePad camera to take a shot of your own face that will then hover above your tank, and you can even stick a funny hat on it, or encase it in an astronaut's helmet, or maybe put it behind cartoon bars using a surprisingly entertaining range of templates. The worst thing is that progress relies on earning medals, so you have to complete the same boring handful of stages over and over using different tanks in order to open up the next boring handful of stages. Now and then there's a real spike in difficulty, and this grows more and more frequent as the campaign wears on and gets increasingly boss-heavy.
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