Steamlands: A Tank Building Game

Steamlands is a genre-hybrid tank building game developed by Nitrome. It combines light real-time strategy mechanics with a side-scrolling perspective and a tile-based tank editor. The tanks have many different types of weapons, armor blocks, treads and miscellaneous items that can be used to build. The RTS elements are contained within the tank itself: groups of weapons can be selected, hot-keyed and then targeted at certain parts of other tanks. Steamlands is a great idea, even if similar ones have been done before, but it doesn’t quite hit every mark.

[caption id="attachment_16606" align="alignleft" width="165" caption="An early tank"][/caption]

The creativity in building a tank by arranging all the weapons in a way that best deals with the challenges presented is enjoyable but it gives you different pre-configured tank each time. The creativity you bring to it is mostly building upon someone else's idea, which is somewhat less satisfying. Also, the tanks that you build only last on that one level and cannot be saved or transferred to another. Despite this though, the combat situations encourage frequent iteration: some of the parts from destroyed tanks can be salvaged and put onto your tank for the rest of the level. Depending on the aggressiveness of the enemy tanks, you can either take your time to build, or possibly be surprised right in the middle of it.

Building though can, at times, be tedious. Since the game is 2D, the priority on what shows up in the foreground it given to the tanks. To deal with blocks behind the tank and therefore out of view, there is a really odd system of hovering over the area until an arrow shows up and then clicking to draw up pieces one at a time. If you accidentally remove a foundation piece of your tank design, it is probably faster to start over, but in some cases, it just has to be put up with. This doesn’t happen often but when it does, it is bad.

The battles have a really interesting dynamic to them. There is an interplay of controlling the movement of the tank, the groupings of the weapons and smartly targeting depending on the construction of the tank. These elements of game work so well because they play back into the main draw of the game: building tanks. For example, one strategy that emerged was targeting the structure of the enemy tank so that weapons fall off instead of being destroyed because then they can be salvaged for your tank.

It is the assembly of building and RTS mechanics along with interesting enemy encounters and weapons that makes Steamlands worth playing, even despite the couple of frustrating elements.

[Play Steamlands]