The Namco tank-battle franchise has its origins in arcades, but the earlier games of this franchise are not necessarily as hard and coin-eating as arcade games typically were. Despite this, the popularity and commercial success of the Famicom/NES at the time had encouraged Namco to make ports of these particular games, one of which is Battle City, the second in the franchise.
Although it is not necessarily a poorly ported-over game, Battle City has not shed enough of its arcade trappings – especially the mistakes that are some of its game designs – to allay the impression that it is a half-hearted transfer.
It has to be mentioned here that Battle City is a re-make of Tank Battalion, which was aesthetically and technically inferior. To players who had played Tank Battalion, Battle City would appear to be a smoother experience.
Players, of which there can be up to two (who share the same screen), take on the role of tanks that are - embarrassingly enough - destroyed from a single shot, regardless of the power-ups that they have collected. Of course, this is not a new drawback for player characters in 8-bit games at the time, but Namco had decided to make the game even harder by adding another mechanic, or more precisely, another vulnerability that can lead to an earlier and more immediate game-over.
In addition to preventing themselves from getting shot to an explosive doom, the player characters need to protect their "base" from being shot too. This "base" is represented at the bottom center of the screen with an eagle icon, and is usually ringed with thin walls of bricks that can be brought down (either by enemy fire or by unwitting players) to expose it to obliteration.
The only way to protect the base from level to level is to destroy incoming, multiple waves of enemy tanks. They come three at a time, and may spawn at the two upper corners of the screen and its upper center; the remaining tanks are handily represented as a handful of icons on the side.
At a pinch, players may attempt to place their tanks in between incoming shots and an exposed base, in the hope of (preferably) shooting them down with shots of their own, or simply sacrificing a life for each shot.
The enemy tanks are shaped and coloured differently from those of the players (though a big enough screen may be needed to appreciate the differences in the shapes). Gameplay-wise, they range from regular tanks with no actual advantages over the player characters, to tanks that have greater speed, fast-moving shots and the ability to take more than a few hits before being eliminated (the others explode from a single hit).
These tanks appear to have no AI patterns that give them deliberate behaviour; most just mill about aimlessly, only (possibly) changing directions when they run into obstacles. They have random rates of fire too (though they can never fire more than one shot every one-and-a-half seconds).
While such enemy designs may seem disappointing to those who had been expecting them to have more direction, they do make playing every level a different experience, though this is not necessarily for the better. As is typical of random AI programming, the player may get lucky if the AI-controlled enemy tanks just mill about far away from the bottom half of the screen, shoot in the other direction and/or keep moving into a wall. At other times, they appear to make a beeline for the player's base (though they may as well go in the other direction the next second later).
The impression that victory is dependent on the player's luck is reinforced further by the designs of the power-up mechanic. While the appearance of any power-up is within the player's control – the players can eliminate flashing-red enemy tanks that spawn periodically to trigger the appearance of power-ups – the locations of these power-ups on the screen and their nature is quite random. A power-up may well appear too far away from the player characters to be collected safely. The power-up may be any one of six types, which may not be what the player wants at the time.
On the other hand, each and every power-up is beneficial, regardless of the circumstances. Each is represented with different-looking icons (some of which may be amusing to those who notice their thematic significance, or inanity), and association is easy. A "grenade" power-up destroys every enemy tank on-screen; a "helmet" power-up renders the player character invulnerable for a while; a "shovel" restores the walls around the base while temporarily upgrading them to steel walls; a "tank" expectedly gives the player character an extra tank (i.e. "life") and a "stopwatch" freezes enemy tanks, making them vulnerable to cheap shots.
Perhaps the most interesting power-up is the "star", as it is accompanied by visual changes on the player characters. As to be expected of star-shaped power-ups in NES games at the time, the "star" buffs the player character, upgrading its shots and changing its sprite to a meaner tank.
Players might have been disappointed by the absence of any power-up that increases the player character's speed, though this would have created a balance issue as it would have made dodging or even shooting down the enemy tanks' (random) shots a lot easier.
The levels in the game have fixed designs. They are generally a bunch of sprites set against a black background, so there would not be much in the way of impressive presentation, though this is still plenty practical with respect to the gameplay and top-down view of the level.
There are bricks, which can be chipped away and eventually destroyed by any shot from any tank. Steel bulwarks (represented with simple, glossy white squares) are immune to most shots, except those from a player character that has collected enough stars to fully upgrade its shots. Trees (represented with typically dirty blobs of green) are not obstacles to movement, but they obscure the player's view of anything under them (though glimpses of bits of sprites can still be seen under them). Water is impassable terrain, while what seems to be iced over terrain causes player characters to slide (oddly enough for tracked vehicles), though enemy tanks do not appear to be affected at all by ice, which can seem unfair.
The 35 levels, called "stages", in the game have a mixture of these terrain types (but not all of them), distributed in manners that makes defending the base easy, exposes it to early shots, eases the ambushing of enemy tanks and/or renders them harder to approach and get shot at, among other things.
It has to be mentioned here that each level is technically a grid of cells. Tanks occupy a square of 4 cells, as do most terrain, as least initially. Shots, on the other hand, always travel along the edges of these cells, meaning that they can either hit tanks or walls in the center of any of their four faces, or the edges of their sprites.
This means that players may use the terrain to block incoming enemy shots, while firing off shots of their own to make glancing hits (which are just as good as direct hits anyway) on enemy tanks. Quick-witted players may even blow away some brick (or steel) walls for such an advantage, though it has to be noted here that other than the base's walls, the other walls cannot be restored in any manner.
However, how Namco's developers approached the level designs may result in some frustration on the player's part. While some levels appear to have terrain distributed in a strategic fashion, some others appear to be little more than tributes to Namco's other games (or even to Namco itself).
These ones can cause some complications: for example, Stage 4, which is a tribute to a certain character in a certain Namco game (Libble Rabble), has the bulk of the center of the map filled with bricks, with the edges being the only free paths. If power-ups appear among those bricks, that's a lot of shooting that has to be done to retrieve them.
The level designs also do not have trends of increasing difficulty in mind. The latter stages may be easier than the earlier ones, and vice versa. In other words, the difficulty is all over the place.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this game is the recycling of the levels; once the player passes level 35, the game loops the 35 levels over again, naming Stage 1 to be "Stage 36" instead. Whereas other arcade games resort to ever-increasing difficulty, e.g. making enemies fiercer, Battle City just cannot, at least not with its random AI scripting.
The sound effects in the game are as one would expect from an 8-bit NES games: beeps, bloops, garbling and such. The continuous garbling that can be heard as the player moves his/her tank around can be a bit annoying, though perhaps quite fitting.
There is not much music in the game, other than a brief, inspirational tune before the start of each stage and one, even shorter tune, for a game-over screen.
Playing with two players may seem to make the game easier, but the cooperative mode of the game does not appear to have chiselled out any means by which nasty players may grief the other; shots from another player character temporarily stuns a player character hit by these, making the latter vulnerable to actual enemy shots, and either player may always attempt to end the game prematurely by deliberately shooting up the base.
Perhaps in an attempt to differentiate the NES version of the game from its arcade roots, Namco included a "Construction" mode, which is fundamentally a level editor. The player can create his/her own level using the terrain sprites, making silly maps like one full of bricks (or steel walls) or their own tributes to other NES games, though the terrain types are still too limited to provide a wide enough palette for the latter. Saving these custom maps is a different matter of course; one would need a memory cassette recorder accessory, and the game did not appear to come with any instructions to use this with the game.
In conclusion, Battle City could have been a better game, if Namco had expanded its game content some more, resorted to less luck-dependent mechanics and presented smarter enemies, among other things that Namco should have done.
(P.S. Namco did implement improvements in the next game in the franchise, called Tank Force, though that game is mainly for the arcades.)