Despite games being my primary hobby, every now and then I’ll find myself tumbling into a subgenre of design thats been around for two decades, and that I’ve never touched. Tank games are one of those. Despite decades of banner ads, I’d never actually tried World of Tanks/Planes/etc, as no one had actually recommended them to me.
For various reasons, Tyr appealed more to me than other entries in genre, and so I actually did end up clicking on an ad for the game. And I’m glad I did, this shits great. Along with some friends, we’ve all ended up playing 50+ hours of this over the last few weeks.
Gameplay and Mechanics
Tyr a 8v8 tank shooter played in 10 minute rounds. Players are spawned on two opposing sides of a semi-symmetrical map, and a team wins by either eliminating every tank on the opposing side, or reaching and holding a capture point. There are also various tiebreakers if time expires, but I’ve never actually seen these come into play, as they mostly exist to force one side to make aggressive moves at all points in the game.
Okay, this is all fairly standard sorts of shooter stuff so far. What makes Tyr great is how the tank combat works. I’m not sure how much of this is genre specific vs game specific so I’m going to go over all of it.
First of all, the shooting. Since everyone is driving a tank, a giant armored vehicle, it is entirely possible to shoot, hit the enemy dead on, and do absolutely no damage, because you shot their armor. Instead, you have to find angles where you can actually inflict damage. Going a step further, it’s also possible to shoot enemies and temporarily take out sub-systems on the tank, like shooting their tracks so they can’t move, or around their gun barrel to stop them from firing.
Additionally, aiming uses a focusing mechanic. Your targeting reticle starts out as a fairly large rectangle, and your shots will end up somewhere in that rectangle. However, waiting will slowly scale down the size of the rectangle, and waiting long enough turns it into a point. Combine this with the fact that reload time can be over 10 seconds, it’s much more important to actually take your time to hit your shot.
Second, fog of war/camouflage. It’s a standard in MOBA’s, but I hadn’t seen it done in an FPS before. The way it works is that you always have vision of the terrain/map, but each tank has a spotting radius, and if an enemy tank is outside of everyone on your teams spotting radius, or hidden in a bush, even if you can see the location they’re in, you can’t see them. This doesn’t mean you can’t shoot them, but it does make it much harder to actually hit them.
Finally, in addition to having a general variety of stats (HP, Armour, hitbox, top speed, etc) all the tanks have some sort of active ability which uses energy to activate. I mostly play Phantom and Mauler, so I’ll use those two as my primary examples.
Phantom is a light tank with high mobility, and almost no armor. It’s a hover tank, so it can aim well from cliffs, and is quite fast, but it can also get one-shot in the wrong situation. It’s active is a temporary cloaking, making it invisible for a short period of time, allowing it to reposition and scout while remaining undetected itself.
Mauler is a heavy tank. It’s slow, heavily armored from the front, and it’s active ability is a ram that does heavy damage, smashing into and knocking back the tanks it hits.
And the abilities are fun! Icarus can temporarily turn into a little plane(AeroGavin eat your heart out), Arbalest gets to temporarily turn into a super long range sniper, Fortis build walls, Ark plants shrubbery, and Tempest can teleport around a bit.
Why I like it
The end result of all the mechanics is a much, much more deliberate shooter then anything I’ve played recently. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old, or maybe it’s because I’m bad, but as much as I love things like Deadlock, I just can’t seem to really play twitch FPS these days.
It’s also incredibly fun to play in a stack, with folks calling out flanks, or having one person scout ahead to set up for snipers, or just have everyone go Icarus, and attempt to dive bomb the enemy. (This does not work, do not do it if you want to win.)
The tank abilities are also fun, and feel unique, even if it can be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve found that my friends are much better at finding good opening routes then I am, so I tend to copy their strategies.
Some Small Complaints
Tyr isn’t perfect. My biggest complaint about the game, small party sizes, is actually fixed now, leading to my second biggest complaint: ping only communication. For a game that’s so heavily based on coordination, having to sort of vibe your way throw that isn’t great.
I do also kind of wish there were more gamemodes then just the “1 life and dead” primary mode, but I suppose they probably don’t want to split the playerbase.
Also, I don’t love the leveling system. Some tanks are just much, much worse before you get them fully leveled, and while this doesn’t take a particularly long amount of time, it’s annoying to fully level a tank to discover you don’t really like it’s play pattern.
Overall
Tyr is good, I like playing it, and oddly enough literally everyone else in my friend group also likes playing it. It’s a very different type of shooter then most other FPS’s I’ve played, but I can’t say that I know how to compare it to other entries in the genre, as I’ve never played them.
It’s a very deliberate, patient experience, and I enjoy that about it. There’s a fun tension of carefully waiting, or having to actually think through if taking a shot is worth it, as opposed to just going for a spray and pray.
Tyr’s free to play on Steam, and I unlocked all the tanks after about 40 hours or so. I don’t know if you can spend real money for progress. There are some cosmetics, but they’re pretty limited. If you’ve ever liked FPS games, I recommend giving it a shot.