The drawback is that the game’s balanced to be much harder to play solo. There’s also a rarer 4-player version that was only released outside of Japan. Friendly fire only pushes you back a bit, instead of stunning you for a few seconds like in Battle City, and your base is immune to ally’s weapon, which certainly helps not blowing it up by accident. Tank Force puts focus on the 2-player mode, making many changes to nullify its disadvantage.

There’s also an actual music to go with this time, pumping out the FM synth as hard as it can. Every fourth round introduces a boss fight in form of a comically gigantic mechanical fort, like those found in vertical shoot-em-ups. There’re 36 stages in total, about as long as the NES game, and the levels themselves now rotate among a variety of realistic-looking battlefields, instead of the abstract kinds found in Battle City. The antagonizing forces have new faces as well, including the jeeps that deploy dynamites all over the place, and the huge, armored vehicles that discharge stronger projectiles, quickly dismantling environments around them. Power-ups, now spawning automatically on field, include an array of items that grant temporary armament upgrade, such as shrinking the size of your tank for smaller hitbox, or a wave beam that goes through walls. The crux of the gameplay is about the same, but comes with many bells and whistles, as expected from a jump to much more powerful hardware. The last game to be powered by Namco System 1 (which housed some of the late ‘80s hit titles like Dragon Spirit and Splatterhouse), Tank Force adopts the framework established in Battle City and ups the ante exponentially. It would take another six years until Namco put out the next installment in the series, developed exclusively for arcades.

Tank force arcade