

Luckily there's a lock-on feature that will do its best to automatically keep you lined up with your target at the expense of the specialist manual targeting that comes with aiming for yourself – and you will want to do the aiming yourself as the game dishes out varying amounts of damage depending on which part of the tank's body you hit. Swinging your cannon around to line up a shot and then dealing out a good chunk of damage is a satisfying experience if you can manage to pull it off – although it's almost impossible to do reliably while moving. "High speed" in a lumbering tank is something of a contradiction – these enormous iron panzers take a fair bit of time to do anything, including aiming at other tanks. Character depth (if you are feeling generous) involves conversations about baking scones, quoting classic literature (which is always followed up by another character pointing out the source of the reference, for fear you may not grasp how well-read these girls are), or the importance of tradition. Naturally, the English school is of course full of girls with tea-themed names who daintily sip the beverage out of fine china cups (yes, even when in a tank) and dream of winning – brace yourselves – a tea plantation. The setting for this arena-based action is a modern Japan school system furnished with World War II-era tanks in the name of sport, with the schools all themed to the point of parody around various countries – Italy, Russia, the USA, and so on. Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank Match DX is an updated version of last year's PlayStation 4 title Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank Match, and comes with all of the original's DLC additions and improvements bolted on to the base game as standard, making this Switch release the perfect one-stop-shop for all of your "tankery" needs.


For the uninitiated, Girls und Panzer is the sole manga/anime series brave enough to tackle an issue we've all been searching for an answer for but until now were too afraid to ask: What would happen if girls practised tank-based martial arts as a school sport? Dear readers, wonder no more.
