Armor Attack

Armor Attack puts the player in command of a light jeep crew fighting through a ruined city full of enemy tanks. The basic balance of power already sets the game's tone: the jeep is fast and nimble, but a single hit means instant death, while the tanks are slow, heavily armored, and hit hard. A direct confrontation is therefore suicide. The winning tactic is to use the grid of streets and rubble as cover, circle around opponents, shoot at their sides, and vanish around a corner between shots. A helicopter also occasionally appears over the city, and unlike the tanks it ignores buildings and flies straight over them – shooting it down is the single most valuable kill in the game.

The Vectrex suits a game like this almost suspiciously well. The city is drawn as a network of thin white lines seen from above, so the overview of the entire battlefield is perfect, and thanks to the sharp vector image you can judge precisely whether a shot will pass through the gap between buildings. The jeep's movement has noticeable momentum, and the analog stick allows for fine directional corrections. The sound design is sparse and terse – the deep rumbling booms of the tanks and the dry crack of your own shot are enough to make the empty streets feel dangerous.

Like Rip Off, the game offers a two-player cooperative mode, where two jeeps move through the same city and can cover each other or lure tanks into a better position. At the time it was among the respected arcade conversions and praised for a more tactical pace than the usual arcade shooter offered. Today Armor Attack feels like a forerunner of later top-down tank arcades: short, precise, and built more on patience than a quick trigger finger. Individual runs are tense precisely because the player can't afford a single mistake, yet the game never feels unfair – enemies move predictably, and a loss is always the result of a bad decision, not chance. That's a quality a lot of more modern games lack.