TurnTurnTank: Globe Defense

So for my first couple reviews, my silly little obsessive compulsive self picked a couple of games that have left me in the fetal position crying for sweet mercy. I have been dominated. I'm not usually this way. I have to be good at every game I play, and that's usually no problem. I'm the kind of gamer that could pick up a game with a learning curve as steep as Mt. Everest and make it my little puppet. If it doesn't quite work out that way at first, I will play until this prophecy has been fulfilled.

[caption id="attachment_14803" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="You can\'t mess up something THIS simple... Right?"]

[/caption]TurnTurnTank: Global Defense grabbed me by the throat and shook me like a bad babysitter. I played, and played, and played. I have to say that I enjoyed the game for a bit. It's the 46th and 47th time that I made a run at the game that I started to get slightly frustrated. The graphics are just delightful in this first effort from Triple-Q iPhone Apps, as are the sound effects. They are both simple but do the game justice and are very reminiscent of "Geometry Wars". You get a fireworks show every time an enemy is vanquished and when your screen becomes flooded with enemies it becomes quite a spectacle.

Triple-Q posits this game as a combination of a tower defense game and a shooter. Don't let them fool you. It's a shooter. Your job is to control (in this game, control is a loose term) a stationary turret in the middle of the screen. Your only job is to turn it in circles and shoot. Enemies, of which there are seven delicious varieties, will move at you on multiple predetermined tracks which become intertwined in later stages, making it more and more difficult to determine which enemies pose a more immediate threat. You have a fire button in the bottom right corner, and two more buttons in the bottom left corner which allow you to deploy shields and a bombs. The shields and bombs are actually implemented pretty well in TurnTurnTank. Instead of simply launching a bomb or deploying the shield in a predetermined location, you push down on either the shield or bomb button and drag it to the location of your choice adding a bit of strategy to your attacks. It won't matter though. You're going to die a ridiculous amount of times. Like more times than Oprah has lost weight and gained it back.

[caption id="attachment_14799" align="alignright" width="300" caption="You\'ll be seeing a lot of this."]

[/caption]What the graphics and sound effects do well for TurnTurnTank, the controls completely screw up. You may be asking yourself, "how can you screw up a game in which all you do is turn in circles and shoot?" Well friend, take a seat and a deep breath.

Ready?

You can't turn your freaking turret fast enough. That's it. You may now be laughing at me and saying, "Rich! Just change that setting in the options menu!" to which I point and laugh back hysterically, noting to you that a setting for touch sensitivity actually doesn't exist. It's a bit ridiculous. It's something so minute that I still have a hard time believing somebody could spend such a long time creating something that could be really fun and then they forgot to do THIS? I have such a hard time believing this, I actually went through the list of apps in my settings menu after writing that last sentence to make sure I wasn't missing this somewhere. I'm not. You simply can not turn fast enough, and for that matter SHOOT fast enough to kill the insane amount of bogeys coming at you. Your turret turns about as slow as a grandma in a grocery store parking lot. Not only can you not turn fast enough, but there's some multitouch gesture I'm not completely aware of that will send your turret spinning at a furious rate which is also of no assistance in your quest to save Earth. Also not helping TurnTurn is the fact that you will constantly accidentally deploy precious shields and bombs onto the side of the playing field where they will do no good. Huzzah.

TurnTurnTank is only two bucks, which is really good because it doesn't include any variety in its' one game mode, no online integration, and shoddy controls. Underneath all this is a mildly entertaining game that could be a load of fun, and it's completely possible Triple-Q could release an update in 3 hours that simply added a setting for touch sensitivity at which point I would write a completely different review. Until this happens, however, Turn Turn Tank is basically unplayable past 12 or so levels. You just can't win.

The trailer for Turn Turn Tank asks, "what would you do if aliens attack earth?" I would shoot lots of aliens really quickly, and haul some serious butt. Sadly for us, this game does neither.