The year is 2001 and a terrible virus has nearly wiped out the entire female population of Earth. The few remaining woman left are gathered by marauding gangs who rule this postapocalyptic world. You are Griffin Spade, a warrior who's a badass behind the wheel of a tank. It's up to you to pilot one of three tanks: One is a light and extremely fast Moto Tank, another is the well-rounded M1A1 Abrams, and the last is the Goliath, which as the name implies is a behemoth with an incredible amount of firepower. With these three tanks at your disposal, it's up to you to head across the radioactive wasteland that used to be known as America, in an attempt to find your one true love.
The 17 levels that you have to go through in the single-player game in order to accomplish your task are filled with enemy tanks and strongholds. Most of the buildings and structures within the levels can be blown up. And while blasting tanks and knocking down buildings with sheer firepower is fun for a while, it gets kind of old. But not to worry; the game is so short that you'll finish it long before that happens. How short? You can probably finish the game with little or no trouble on the default difficulty setting in just a few hours. However, while the game doesn't have a single-player mode that will keep you entertained for more than a day, its multiplayer mode is sure to keep you playing for quite sometime.
In multiplayer mode you can battle with four players simultaneously. One of the coolest features in this mode that other N64 multiplayer games should have is the big split screen one of the players gets when playing with only three players. Whether playing with two, three, or four players, you can select from three different multiplayer setups. The first is the common deathmatch mode where you simply try to blow up your opponents. The second is called battlelord mode; in this mode your main goal is to try to collect your opponents' QueenLords, a kind of capture-the-flag mode. The last multiplayer option is annihilation mode, which is basically another deathmatch mode where the player left standing wins. All of these modes are incredibly fun, thanks to ease of control and lots of power-ups that can turn the tide of the battle at any moment. Visually BattleTanx isn't anything special. It suffers from some heavy fog, meaning that you can't see too terribly far away. The buildings and structures are fairly nondescript, and after a while it all looks the same, though the frame rate stays at a descent pace even in the multiplayer mode.
Overall, BattleTanx is a mildly entertaining game when playing in the single-player mode. Unfortunately, its short length and redundancy make it more of a rental game than a game to own. However, if you've been looking for a good multiplayer game that you and a couple friends can play over and over again, BattleTanx is right up your alley.
