Armoured Assault

The Good
Tolerable graphics, over-cheerful music, very good sound effects, and offers some nice strategic and action-packed gameplay. And nice militaristic cover art. (I'll come to that in a moment.)

The Bad
Well, obviously, there's not terribly much to do in this game in modern terms - tiny screen, limited controls, pretty simple premise. Nowadays, it's probably good for just random short games and possibly sheer nostalgia factor, but little else.

The game being two players only is a slight problem - not anything against the concept itself, it's just that you never seem to find the second player when you are in the mood for a particular game. This game would have benefited some from having computer controlled player...

The Bottom Line
This is easily one of the better two-player Spectravideo games. It's a pretty simple game as far as tank fighting games go: Just drive around, shoot stuff, collect power-ups from the designated stations. But even on such limited terms, it's got enough glitter to make it look like a competently-put-together game.

When I was a kid, this game was so cool. Army stuff is cool, right? This game has got tanks! Tanks that shoot stuff! And it has cheerful militaristic music! And quite amazing, television-speaker-shattering booming sound effects! Who needs toy tanks when you have a militaristic tank game on your computer? ...okay, maybe I'm re-interpreting my childhood a little bit.

Perhaps this game would have withstood the test of time a bit better with a little bit more maneuverability - the tanks are pretty big and the screen is a bit small. My friends liked a magazine-published game called "Tank Duel" for Commodore 64 a little bit more, even when it had less features than Armoured Assault (No fuel or ammo tracking), mostly because the tanks were smaller, which meant a lot more room to run around.

But all in all, Armoured Assault isn't that bad. It's certainly fun enough in small doses.