HG: What would you get if you combined World of Tanks with Animal Crossing? Well, I’ll tell you that this is never a mashup I would have imagined before Brave Tank Hero. This upcoming release on Wii U and 3DS is basically that, although the end result is quite distinct on its own. So, what do I mean by these comparisons? As the name Brave Tank Hero implies, this is a game about tanks. You drive a tank about, destroy opposing tanks, complete the mission, and rinse and repeat. Where does the Animal Crossing comment come in? Simple: it’s a cute art style. The visuals are bright and colorful, the tanks are chibi-like in their shaping and you can see the curvature of the world making it feel teeny tiny as the small houses dotting the landscape.
DD:
Brave Tank Hero is a distressing affair. On one hand, arena-based tank combat games ought to be explored on consoles and Natsume deserves serious props for publishing one at all. On the other, this game is the embodiment of everything that could possibly go wrong with the untapped subgenre.
NL:
Instead of focusing on fixing the flaws that pestered the 3DS release, it appears that the developers went with the "Quantity over Quality" philosophy. That decision backfires. Nothing has changed between the two iterations of the game, both share the same flaws and the few virtues the 3DS version had have now become problems - textures have been stretched out and the 3D models now look rather bleak. What is unacceptable about this port is that it never tried to take advantage of the Wii U features and capabilities.
NL:
In Conker's Bad Fur Day, there is a chapter towards the end of the game called War. In that chapter there is one small section in which the protagonist squirrel has to get inside a tank and storm the Tediz's base. Brave Tank Hero is somewhat similar to that section of Conker's BFD, in the sense that you use tanks to storm the enemy invasion.
