A Wonderful Way to Waste Your Time
By C.A. Ramirez
Title: Sprocket Tank Design
Developed and published by: Hamish Dunn
Simple games with refined mechanics can become a veritable black hole, sucking the gamer into it along with time, mass, and light itself. Sprocket: Tank Design is a wonderful time waster that should be on everyone’s desktop, ready to go once the tedium of Zoom reaches its boiling point. Fair warning, as this title is currently in early access, but it sports enough working bells and whistles to offset the occasional glitch. After a modest six hours of game time, I can safely say that this game is entirely too much fun, especially for those with a proclivity for construction and design.
Sprocket: Tank Design is immediately recognizable to fans of games like Trailmakers and Besiege. The UI is very similar and basically allows you to control and modify nearly every aspect of your tank. Everything from the hull’s length and width can be adjusted, as well as a multitude of its parts, including tank treads, turrets, and your arsenal. The game has a nice collection of scenarios that will place your tank in the middle of stages with varying landscapes. A muddy beach, landing scarred with open trenches, will require you to change the tread and may force you to redistribute the weight of your tank, as well as tune the engine and transmission. There is no shortage of customizable aspects to have fun with, and almost every session results in a newfound understanding of the game's mechanics.
I am not one to read game manuals, but I can sport a fair deal of patience when the right game comes along, and believe me, Sprocket: Tank Design is one of those games. Even with other titles that can be very complex, such as Farming Simulator, I prefer to dive head first and learn how the different vehicles handle and operate, like the reckless amateur that I am. After about twenty minutes, you will understand the very basics of how a tank moves, and the dimensions it can handle. There are weight limits to consider, and you can customize the engine and transmission to your liking … for better or worse.
I must admit, a general knowledge of how things work under the hood of a car would be quite useful here, but again, video games are no place for cautious cats — they require the reckless abandon that allows lions, and some of the more cunning squirrels, to dominate the wild as they see fit. The same applies to your approach towards video games that give the player full creative control, be fearless. This is America for god’s sake, not some limp-wristed beacon of peace and civility — we make things go, “boom!” Anything less would be the equivalent of slapping George Washington across the face with a wireless controller, but I digress. This wonderfully complex game fuels the creative juices that percolate inside each and every one of us. From swift mechanizations to awkward monstrosities and everything in between, Sprocket Tank Design will leave you obsessed with manufacturing your own little slice of war.
