Tankracer is a go-kart game set on an army base's training grounds. You can choose one of several tanks equipped with old-school canons and drive it around obstacle-laden race tracks. The terrain quality and frequency of turns will affect your speed, as will getting hit by a weapon blast. Essentially, Tankracer is a Mario Kart clone, without the third-person perspective or lovable characters. There's no mobile Mario yet, though, so Tankracer definitely has a niche, despite its lack of multiplayer.
In Tankracer, you select one of several nonthreatening tanks with cute names, like Bumbleboy or The Wizard. Each of these has a different rating in two categories, weight and power. The former is inversely proportional to the speed of the vehicle, while the latter is indicative of weapon strength. The vehicles aren't that well balanced, though, as the zippier vehicles can leave the better-equipped tanks in the dust, thereby avoiding all weapon fire. The enemy AI will sometimes cleverly fire over barriers or set mines to slow you down, but a fast tank can make up lost time quickly.
Tankracer has a lot of track variety over its four competition cups. Some of the maps are smaller and lend themselves to close-quarters skirmishes, in which you're constantly jockeying for position. When you hit an opposing vehicle with a weapon, it will spin around once or twice, making it an obstacle for other vehicles. When all the tanks are attempting to funnel through a narrow section of the track, this can become a real hazard. If you're in the lead, laying a mine can slow down more than just the tank that hits it.
In addition to mines, you can pick up homing missiles and shock waves to unleash on your rivals. A missile, once launched, will automatically target the driver just ahead of you, stopping him for about a second. A shock wave will send out a circle of magical arrows, which will push any vehicles in their path off course. These are best fired when you're stuck in the middle of a crowd and want to cut through the madness. Tankracer needed a couple more weapons for variety's sake, but the ones included go a long way toward fostering strategic play.
Tankracer's overhead perspective isn't particularly stunning. The tanks look tiny, as do the topographical features of the track terrain. The game runs at an average frame rate, according to the standards of the Nokia 6620. Tankracer is hardly a graphical showcase, but it's not bad.
The game's sound is similarly average. A bugle tune announces the start of each race, after which you'll hear firing noises and other intermittent sound effects. You won't miss out by turning the sound off, but it's hardly offensive to leave on. Suffice it to say, Tankracer's audiovisual presentation is pretty unremarkable.
Tankracer is a good racing game that could have really used Bluetooth multiplayer. Karting is, by nature, a social sport, and it's too bad that players are stuck with the AI. Fortunately, the CPU-controlled racers behave fairly intelligently and sometimes use the weaponry available to them in unpredictable ways. Everyone knows army tanks are synonymous with wacky fun, and this game is a further example of that truth.
