Mountain Tanks: Take Aim!
Everyone has a spare 10 minutes every once in a while, in which they don’t have anything to do. Sure you could water your plants or exercise, but where is the fun in that? There are plenty of games you could use to fill that 10-minute gap (MacApper has covered a few before), one of my personal favorites is Mountain Tanks.
It is a simple shooting game in which you are a tank. You can’t move the tank (for simplicity) however you can move the barrel up, down, left and right. You have a small arsenal of weapons available to you that include Rockets, Grenades and Barrel Makers. For impeding your opponent, you have Smoke Screens and Wall Makers available for you to use.
The aim is to destroy your opponents fort, which is comprised of a number of randomly selected buildings. Each building starts off with a score of 100, and every time you hit it, points come off. When the building goes to 0, the building is demolished. The first person to destroy all the opponents buildings wins.
Another plus point of the game is that the controls are very simple. Use the directional arrows to adjust your barrel, and space to fire. If Mountain Tanks sounds like something you would like to try, I recommend that while you’re playing you press ‘c’ to see all the little extra buttons that makes the game playable.
This games ‘Party Piece’ however is network gaming. Up to 6 people can play at the same time; the great thing is you only need 1 registered copy, which acts as the server for everyone to play. If you’ve not got multiple Macs, or you’re not on a network with them, then you can play any combination of up to 6 human or ‘computer’ players (e.g. 5 humans, 1 computer; or 1 computer, 1 person).
Overall, Mountain Tanks is a great, simple game; even if, like me, you’re not a big gamer. It’s a good bit of fun to fill a spare few minutes. This game was built to be simple, but I did find I had a few gripes with it. With an arsenal of only 3 weapons to use, game play gets stale after a few single matches. Playing with other Humans is usually more interesting than playing with the computers. Another gripe is the graphics. As a shareware app, it is not expected that the graphics be outstanding, but if the graphics could be improved, it would make the game all that much more fun.
Mountain Tanks is $18 and available from Battery Acid Games.
I’ve been playing this one for awhile now, and It’s heck of lot more addicting than a screenshot can suggest!