Jump Tanks Preview

I had high hopes for this game: I play a lot of League of Legends and DOTA2, and Jump Tanks looked like a mech version of those kind of games. The idea is you choose three pilots and their mechs, customise them and then jump into battlegrounds against other people around the world. That’s the idea at least. The reality is empty servers, and I have a few suspicions as to why.

First, let us go over the actual gameplay. It’s rather fun: you control some variation on a futuristic tank with an array of weapon choices, each of which are obviously different. A few of them felt very overpowered, with my personal favourite gun being a sniper rifle that fires as fast as you can click and deals damage equivalent to a third of the enemy’s health. Each mech also has a grenade style attack, that all have a different name-but at this point in development they are all the same.

They say the sand gets everywhere

Another feature that distinguishes the tanks in Jump Tanks from tanks in real life is, perhaps obviously, their ability to jump. Some tanks can double jump. Others can hover. Both of these abilities make movement a pretty key skill to get a good hold of, particularly if you play against a weapon that has a big area of effect. I found that if you could move around quickly and unpredictably, it makes it very hard to land a hit on you. This can be put down to skill too, since when I did have opponents it was on North American servers with about 100ms ping, and while that’s a little higher than I am used to in most online games, the netcode held up and I didn’t notice any obvious lag.

What I did notice was an awful framerate: I have well above the recommended system specs on the laptop I first ran the game on, and had to drop the resolution and graphics options right down to achieve a consistent 30fps. Moving onto my much beefier desktop, I was able to reach a capped 60fps at my native resolution and high medium settings, but this was not consistent and on some maps with some mech designs I was only hitting 40fps.

The city level drops the frame rate, even when not in motion

I understand that this is an Early Access game, but when computers that meet the minimum requirements aren’t getting above 10fps, something needs to be done before you start selling your game. Also, while I’m moaning about this: don’t just put preset options in the graphics settings: give a custom option that allows us to turn on and off different settings to customise things to our liking. This is a bastion of PC gaming, and the absence of any real graphics options looks pretty bad.

I’ve been reading through the steam forum for Jump Tanks, and it’s very much the same as the game: pretty empty. There have been two of the developers posting on there, but only one with any frequency, and that’s really no more than a post every few days. I would hope that the team are working on updates, but at the time of writing this, the game hasn’t had a single update in over a month. This game could really do with regular tweaks and updates, even if they’re just small things, just to keep the player base interested.

The hipster of rocket jumping tank pilots

As it stands, unless you have a friend to play with you’ll be in a game on your own, running around and shooting at the randomly firing turrets which will kill you if you let their bullets hit you. These turrets earn you a point, and in a multiplayer game you might reach the 100 point goal before the time runs out with those additional points. Playing on your own, you don’t stand a chance, since the turrets will spawn randomly behind you with little to no audio cues and you’ll be dead before you notice.

All in all, this is a game with great potential, which is precisely why Early Access is perfect for it. Unfortunately, partially because the game runs poorly on lower systems and partially because there have been no updates for a long time now,  there’s no player base, with Steam Spy suggesting that only 500 people even own this game. It’s a shame, because I would really like to see Jump Tanks in a more complete state with lots of players populating the servers.