Armored Evolution is a perfect example of how simple a game can be while also being immensely fun and actually quite challenging. On the surface, Armored Evolution is an arena shooter, but that quick description would really do this fun little game a disservice. When you boot it up for the first time, within five minutes of playing you’ll be thinking to yourself that it is extremely familiar, and it won’t keep your interest much longer than another five minutes. Well, I believe it’s is safe to say you’d be wrong thinking like that. Armored Evolution features the addictive, “give it one more try” type of gameplay that has made other games such as Candy Crush and Angry Birds so popular, but in those two titles you can’t launch glorified nukes from your own battle tank, can you?
The goal in Armored Evolution is simple: blow up everything that tries to kill you. That number can vary from one or two enemies to half a dozen enemies all trying to blow you out of the arena. The game seems rather easy for the first few levels of the first world, but trust me when I say the difficulty increases rather quickly, but it doesn’t become so difficult that you feel it’s impossible. It never really feels like the AI is totally invincible. A lot of the time, you will lose a battle due to a rocket that you should have been able to dodge managing to get you. What Armored Evolution does extremely well is to tap into that “one more go” ethos of video gaming. When you get destroyed in a battle, it’s so quick to jump straight back in that a lot of the times you will just try one more time, again and again.
Combat is fun (but can become repetitive over time), fast, and frantic at times, the latter really coming into play when you have three or four tanks chasing and pinning you into a corner of the arena. There is also a degree of tactics to be used in the battles due to the fact that all your weapons have a cooldown period. So, to a degree, you need to plan when to use weapons and see if there is anything to hide behind while the weapons recharge and the enemy tanks/turrets try their best to blow you into little pieces. Speaking of weapons, there a few different options to choose from, and there are four different weapon slots, each with different types available.
Artillery are your normal go-to weapons, weak but with a short recharge time. Hull, Tech, and Ultimate are where you’ll find the more powerful weapons/abilities available, which include missiles, turbo boosts, bouncing energy orbs and a few others. These are the ones that will really win you the battles as some of them are really powerful, but with that power comes a long recharge time. There are also a couple of tanks to choose from, again each with their own perks. One will sacrifice a Tech slot, for example, in exchange for a higher level of health. The differences between them may be small, but deciding which one to use could be the difference between winning and losing.
If you use a keyboard to control your tank, then you’ll find using your mouse to aim a real treat. You can change the button configurations too, meaning if you have a mouse with enough buttons, you can map all four weapons/abilities to fire without having to press any keys on the keyboard. Controlling the tank with a keyboard isn’t as great, however. Using the standard WSAD is fine but can become quite awkward, and you may find yourself driving into walls every now and then while you fire away at oncoming enemy tanks.
Overall, Armored Evolution is a fun arena battler that you can either play by yourself or with friends. The campaign mode is set across 7 different arenas, each with 8 stages. There is also an endless mode where you can see just how good you are by lasting as long as you can. For the price of a cheap takeaway meal (just over £7 on Steam), Armored Evolution is a game I highly recommend to pick up as it will either keep you hooked for a good couple of hours or will scratch that gaming itch if you only have a few minutes to spare. The next step for Armored Evolution is to get itself on the Nintendo Switch, a console perfect for quick, five-minute, pick up and play sessions.
Developer: Burst2flame Entertainment
Publisher: Burst2flame Entertainment
Platforms: PC
Release Date: 1st February 2019