What was intended to be an innovative DS title grows from the touch screen’s roots. The game is played using the touch screen and stylus almost exclusively. The A and B buttons will double as selection and ordering functions, but the fact that you’ll be using that free hand to order around your units renders the right side of the console useless. The only departure from an entirely stylus-based input is that the L button will change modes from recon to attack by holding it down, and the D-pad as a scrolling tool for the bottom screen’s map. So, we’ve got the touch screen, D-pad, and L button. That’s not too bad; Kirby Canvas Curse used only the touch screen and turned out wonderfully. So what went wrong?

Actually, a better question would be somewhere in the ballpark of what may have happened to the fun. For one, the gameplay boils down to circling enemy tanks and firing until they blow up. The short-lived explosions are probably the only fun part of combat. The touch screen employs a top-down map of the area for players to draw out the direction they would like their tank to go in. The first hitch starts here, because although yes it may be sort of fun to draw on a map and have units follow those directions, you can only give orders within the limitations of what’s displayed on the screen. Yes, the D-pad scrolls the map, but not while players map out their heading.

The top screen displays a hardly-used viewpoint of your tank, of which you can look around via stylus, pulling the camera around the tank’s center. Milestone, having obviously realized that most of the player’s attention would be focused on the bottom screen, skimped in the graphical department. What that leaves players with harks back to the foggy, early Nintendo 64 days of muddy-looking textures and severely limited draw distances.

This is paralleled by the wild goose hunt-styled gameplay, in which each mission seems to begin with. The enemies are never shown until you find them by roaming the hazy world of Tank Beat. Slowly, I might add. Of course, there is a layout for the way each mission should play, dictating the route enemies will take and whatnot, but if the story calls for the enemy to be spooked, this changes and leaves players hunting in the dust. As a structure, missions are in the 10-minute range with an objective and qualifiers for the failure of it. That is not to quickly say they take 10 minutes, but that this is the time limit given to complete them. Unfortunately for the game, it is an artificial and extremely generous amount of time as most missions can be completed in roughly two to three minutes. This adds up to a single-player campaign just short of four hours in all.

There are also a few multiplayer facets of gameplay, with Tank Beat offering Wi-Fi play against up to four people or off a single cart with the same maximum player limit. Unfortunately, the nearly anonymous game will ensure that you won’t have any friends who own it, and the pathetic status of its Wi-Fi community --there isn’t one.

The story follows a cadet, Vill Vitt, as he quickly loses his commanding officer and wanders the land for him. Shortly, he is picked up by a guerilla force who for whatever reason accepts him into their squad. The story is forgettable, and presented by text with accompanying anime-style illustrations of the character talking. The only really enjoyable thing in Tank Beat is probably the soundtrack, which felt like Viewtiful Joe’s on military pills.

That is not to say that Tank Beat is horrible, but the unique gameplay and idea seemed to only succeed as a thought to maybe write on a drawing board, and then never grew any more. There is nothing beyond what the game presents in the first mission, except more enemy tanks and characters thrown into the mix. The multiplayer is scarce, so once the afternoon-long game is completed, there is very little replay value in its Skirmish Mode or any other facet. Of course there is a little variety in the Tank Selection before each mission and each one’s strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not enough to change the gameplay drastically enough to make it feel as if there is actual balance or even thought put into what vehicle players use.

The flaw is just so obvious that I felt sympathetic towards Milestone while playing. The game needed a lot more time in development and it never got that opportunity to mature. While it is certainly not worth the price of admission, I would be hard-pressed to not recommend it as at least a rental. This is only because it feels like it could have been a sleeper hit, and that kind of thought is a nice one when the final product gets into a gamer’s hands and feels like an extended demo for a game that won’t be released in a year or so.