Game Review: Tank Trax (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Setting the Scene

When you begin a new game of Tank Trax, it will always ask four questions; Alter names, Wind to vary, Day or Night and Mountains or Foothills. The battleground terrain will then, quite literally be drawn out based on the answers that you have provided.  Mountains, obviously giving a steeper terrain to shoot over than foothills.

If you’ve chosen day, you’ll see two tanks then appear.  Player 1 on the left and Player 2 (or the computer) on the right.  If, however, you chose night, the tanks will be invisible until a player has taken a shot.  Once the fired shell has landed and created an explosion, you’ll then see the competing tanks briefly appear for a few seconds and then disappear again.

Gameplay

Before a shot is fired, the player (whose go it is) must choose the inclination and velocity of their next shot.  The range of inclination is any angle between minus 15 degrees up to 85 degrees.  The velocity is based on the speed of the shot and takes into effect the wind direction and speed.  The wind direction and speed are shown at the top of the screen.  It’s great when you fire a super-fast shot and get a direct hit!  A shame that games back then didn’t have replays.

Funny Oops Moments!

You will find sometimes that you will accidently blow up your own tank!  This isn’t a bug and there are two ways of doing this.  The first is to fire a shell with hardly any velocity and more even more humorously, firing a shot and the wind blows the shell back onto you.

Near misses fired at the either the opposing tank or your own, show the word Close at the top of the screen.  If it’s at the enemy tank, you then know to slightly amend the inclination or velocity for your next go to try and hit your target on your next go.

Not a Rolling Army of Tanks

Unlike the instructions imply, there are no columns of tanks when playing the game.  It is purely a one-versus-one tank battle. The tanks cannot move in any direction so are always in a static position.

Graphics and Animation

The graphics for Tank Trax are simple but effective.  The tanks cannon flashes in line with the trajectory of where you wish to aim your shot.  The higher the increment (steps of ten), the higher the cannon points (or obviously the reverse if moving your aim lower.).

Hitting the mountains or ground causes an explosion of animated dots to radiate around that surface area.  This is a neat effect animated effect.  That hit region will disappear, which can lead to more opportunities to get a better aim through a different pathway

Sound Effects and Music

Once the game has loaded and pressing any key, after a few moments of the screen flashing Tank Trax (in a Manic Miner style), there is a short ditty and then silence again.

During the game, sound effects consist low pitch and high pitch beeps and if a tank is struck, a longer rang of beeps go on.  This is then followed by The Last Post being played.  This takes a while to play but upon close reading of the instructions, pressing the S key can escape this part without having to wait for the whole tune to be played out in full.

Should your aim fire out of range of the screen, there are a couple of deep beeping sounds (with the message Way Out shown at the top).

On A Final Note

I think of Tank Trax as being a precursor to the Worms series of games.  The basic idea is very similar but on a much simpler basis. The loading screen is the original Mastertronic logo   This was quite common for the earlier releases of Mastertronic games.

You may like to know that the game was also released on a Plus One Mastertronic cassette.  This has catalogue reference code IS 0508 and the other game to accompany it on the alternate side of the tape was Bullseye.

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