Battle Supremacy – Ground Assault is a bland tank shooter with uninspired design and annoying combat that make playing it a mission worth deserting.
Battle Supremacy – Ground Assault’s flaws won’t infuriate players as much as it will bore them. The game puts would-be soldiers behind the wheels of powerful tanks to fight in explosive conflicts that, on paper, should be exciting affairs. The harsh reality is that the experience, while serviceable, winds up being a stale and forgettable tour of duty.
Tank games should have two goals: allow players to blow stuff up, then make them feel awesome doing it. Battle Supremacy accomplishes the first mission but stumbles on the latter thanks to lengthy reload times that hamper every offensive action. Whether it’s firing a weapon or changing ammunition types, be prepared to wait between 4-7 seconds on average (bigger guns like mortars go in the double digits) before unleashing another volley. It may be more realistic, but it creates an annoying and unsatisfying stop-and-start combat flow. Having to wait to switch weapons is the most egregious offense as that’s usually the quick alternative to reloading ammo in most shooters. Controlling a tank should be a power fantasy, not an exercise in watching meters tick down while cowering behind a wall.
Everything in the game revolves around the hook of collecting parts to assemble the tank of your dreams. These war machines come in a variety of classes and can be mixed and matched with different weapons, radar, armor, among other equipment. Attaching new parts can help reduce reload times (albeit barely) as well as improve other stats, but Battle Supremacy randomly doles out these rewards after missions. That means you’ll have to grind to unlock the parts you need/want, but nothing in the game is engaging enough to warrant such a commitment.
Battle Supremacy features a campaign that’s just a collection of boring missions with little to them other than destroying opposing tanks. That could work to an extent but subpar production values, technical hitches such as frame drops, and a bland, repetitive soundtrack diminish any inkling of entertainment. Enemy A.I. ranges from being relentlessly aggressive to haplessly ineffectual and rarely push players to adopt new tactics. No matter what class of tank, the best strategy always lies in hanging back and sniping from a safe distance. The almost hilariously cliché premise of a rogue military A.I. perceiving mankind as the Earth’s greatest threat doesn’t have enough narrative punch behind it even make it ironically entertaining.
If the story doesn’t do it for you, the Drills, a mode of selectable missions, won’t serve as much of an escape either. It features dozens of light variations on six mission types: Destroy, Defend, Intercept, Escort, and Stand-Off. They’re all exactly what they sound like and suffer the same flaws as the campaign: they’re incredibly flat and one-note. They’ll barely retain your attention long enough to compete one set, let alone 30+ tiers of them, which are just the same missions but harder. The same sentiment holds true for making custom games with various stipulations, such as Deathmatch and King of the Hill. Playing online pits players’ custom creations against those of other humans, which has some appeal in a BattleBots sort of way. Good luck finding anyone to battle with, though.
Some may argue that the worst thing a game can be is boring more so than bad. At least a broken experience can become memorable for its atrocities. Battle Supremacy – Ground Assault exists in that unfortunate purgatory of being functional but completely unremarkable in every way. With no shortage of superior alternatives, you’re better off going AWOL on this mission.
Battle Supremacy – Ground Assault is available now for Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided a digital Switch code for the purposes of this review.
