Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank match is a game that’s based on the anime. The Asia version had English subtitles. The main draw is the tank gameplay, as the story mode is an afterthought. It’s best to have watched the 12 episode anime as well as the first movie as the story mode has a framing device where all the characters, from all the schools, meet up together to reflect on their past battles. In particular, it covers only the events of the movie. So while it’s pretty cool to participate in some of the more iconic scenes in the movie, at the same time, there isn’t much content. The story mode can be finished within two to three hours, it would have been a better fit if it covered the events of the 12 episode anime as well, although there was a previous game that had done this already.
The flow of the story isn’t great either. It’s told in a visual novel style but it is boring since it’s mostly comprised of exposition from the characters. They literally state what happened and the tactics that they used, which adds nothing new. The actual tank gameplay in the story missions is short. They are over within minutes, something even under a minute, so you end up mostly reading rather than playing. Making matters worse are the pop-up dialogue that wrestle control away from you during the story missions.
The controls are simple with the analogue stick being used to move the tank. Push the stick forward to move the tank forward, back to move backwards, and left and right to change the direction. So it’s kind of like tank controls but not. It can take a short while to get used to, particularly since you use the right stick at the same time to control the turret and aim. A neat aspect is that while you can quickly move the reticle and camera around, your turret moves much more slowly so you need to wait for the turret to catch up to where you’re aiming before firing, otherwise you will miss what you were trying to aim at.
The right trigger is used to fire and the left trigger is to use any special abilities the tank may have, such as its second turret. Both you and the enemy tanks have a health bar and damage inflicted is affected by which section you hit. You do scratch damage if you don’t hit them in an area with less armor. You can aim at their treads to break it, rendering them immobile so you can then circle around to hit their weak points for massive damage. Unfortunately, it’s not all fun and games since the controls still ends up clunky until a few hours in.
There are a lot of nuances with the game that the short tutorial does not teach you or mention at all. There are speciality abilities based on the character you picked as the commander. You can activate a scope for higher precision aiming. There are items you can equip to give you another edge. You can perform a 180-degrees spin, and you can reduce damage by tilting the armor at an angle. Different tanks handle differently and have different firepower. The smaller ones are nimbler but lack power in their shots, and also easy to get one-shotted by heavy tanks. While the heavy tanks are slow and hard to turn, but pack serious firepower.
The maps that you fight on vary in size and quality. Some are tiny and cramped, while others are huge and impressive. The smaller ones mean it’ll quickly devolve into an all-out brawl, while the bigger ones mean you’ll spend minutes trying to find the opponent as your tank slowly lumbers across the plains. While cool to see familiar areas, some have narrow corridors that is difficult to manoeuvre the tank in, which reflects reality, but does not make a fun game. Turning the tight corners, even normal corners, are such a pain. There is a drift function but you need to be going at top speed in order to activity it and it’s mapped to the same button as braking. There is also one map which is big, has a lot of corridors, and has multiple levels. It’s extremely painful navigating the place trying to find the opponent.
There are five match types in total: heading to a destination marker, defeating all opponents, one vs one, surviving for the time limit, and defeating the flag tank (aka the leader). Time limits range from five minutes to fifteen minutes, so these matches are designed to be short. That’s the biggest negative, the matches are so short and easy in the single player content that there’s little strategy involved beyond roaming around to find the enemy and firing at them.
The other major single player content is the Domination Mode, which is described as an original story mode. It’s basically a five-match tournament where you can play as one of the nine available schools. Each round has your opponent, match type, and arena randomly selected. The story is naturally inconsequential and has the characters chatting about their next opponent, their progression in the tournament, and what they are winning. This mode takes around five hours to finish and it’s mostly easy except for one school. That school forces you to use one light tank, meaning some of the matches are extremely unfair and frustrating as it’ll be one versus five heavy tanks.
Then there are the Extra missions, of which there are sixteen of them. Each mission has three difficulties: Normal, Hard and Extreme. These missions are nothing new but allows further replication of some anime battles, or crazier scenarios such as one tank against five of the more powerful tanks. Finally, the Custom mode allows you to set up your own custom match against the CPU. You can choose pretty much all the parameters, from the location to match type to which tanks to use.
There’s also a leveling system where experience points are gained from the actions that you do during the battle. Perform good actions such as successfully quick loading, or hitting a weak point, or breaking the tread of an opponent, will give you more points. Leveling up, along with completing the Story, Domination and Extra missions, will unlock tanks, characters and customizations. Once you’ve unlocked enough of them, you can customize the tanks to your heart’s content. The graphics are also decent for what you’d suppose is a game with a lower budget, especially an anime-based game. Plus, it has all the voice actors from the anime.
Overall, Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank Match is, for a game based on an anime, quite decent and one of the best in that niche genre. The tank gameplay is simple to learn and contains a bit more complexity than at first glance. It’s still not overly complicated but it is fun enough blasting your opponents. Being able to recreate scenes from the movie, as well as going through recognizable scenery from the anime is awesome. It’s worth the cost of importing if you’re a fan of the anime, but probably not if you’re not a fan.
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