Bushes are a tank's best friend

Image credit: Stoke Games

Kaboom! A trailer has just landed in your inbox, blasting your laptop apart in a sputter of copper and fossilised breadcrumbs. You scan the horizon desperately with your binoculars, but there is no sign of the aggressor. Then: kablam! An incendiary press release whistles into the wreckage of your computer. You unscrunch it with smouldering fingers, and read the words: the first public playtest for Tyr is underway, running till 2nd August.

What is Tyr? Kablooie! A high-explosive Steam page link reduces what remains of your PC to atoms. Ah, I see: Tyr is a new multiplayer tank shooter from Stoke Games, a team of former League of Legends, Valorant, StarCraft 2, and Destiny 2 developers. In case I hadn't spelled things out enough, it puts a high price on visibility and reconnaissance. What you can't see can most definitely turn you into a crater. Here's that trailer.

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Did you skip the trailer? It took me a whole 12 seconds to embed that, but never mind, you ingrate - here are some highlights. Firstly, Tyr seems pleasantly anal about armour. The game's tanks have unique, colour-coded armour profiles, with thicker plates on certain parts of the vehicle, and their guns also have different penetration values. In general, your shots will drill deeper if you strike head-on, rather than socking the target at an angle. In the words of the old Pacha meme: when the 90mm shell hits that Panzer just right, these hills sing.

Not that there are any Panzers in Tyr. It's a sci-fi game with large, colourful landscapes and chirpy Hot Wheels designs befitting of the development team's previous contributions to the hero schlooting biz. It also has hovertanks that can strafe and tilt forward to shoot downwards into gorges.

Again, stealth is key. Each tank has a maximum vision range and a detection radius, shown on your minimap. Tanks are invisible to each other before they're formally detected, as indicated by a HUD icon. Lighter tanks are harder to see coming, making them better snipers, but heavy tanks can make use of bushes and other camouflage to close the distance. Each tank also has a special ability, like being able to conjure a wall. Tanks! The gift of a thousand uses.

In itself, "free-to-play multiplayer tank game" isn't a phrase that gets my motor running – we already have one World of Tanks and I haven't touched that since 2013. But I quite like the balance of nerdiness and simplicity Stoke Games are going for with Tyr. It's down for release in early access later this year. Let us know if you have thoughts on that playtest.