This is a simple but rather atmospheric game where, I guess, you play as a PTSD-stricken tank crewman reliving the last campaign or barely hanging onto a new one.

Another 8-bit game in the tradition of Battle City and Iron Tank. Each of the ten levels is in some way substantially different while retianing the same basic gameplay. And it's pretty fun, sometimes tough but never unfair, once you've practiced the levels and gotten to know them. The game isn't too stingy with extra lives, and if you've lost too many you can always go back to the main menu and continue from the last level with the same number of lives you had when you first reached it.

For more replayability, the game unlocks a new tank each time you beat it with a different tank, having a total of four. The light tank (the third one available) is the most fun to play as, making the gameplay faster and more frantic. Since the story is identical, for each tank, it might have been nice if it unlocked al the other ganks after the first playthough. Gameplay can be a little slow with the others, but not too much--the game stays true to its roots.

Note that this is an ANTI-WAR game. The story is unusually dark and mature for games of this style. You play a severely wounded soldier. Each level is a PTSD-induced flashback, starting with your character waking up screaming until the doctors pmp him full of drugs. The story tackles war crimes and has a bleak, perhaps heavy-handed ending. An original take, not what you'd expect.

The game isn't the best Battle Citty-style game on Steam. (It even has bugs, such as how in one level the men you have to kill can escape offscreen, forcing you to restart the level. Some of the achievements are near ipossible to get.) Any player who likes retro games can expect a couple hours of decent fun, as long as the story doesn't put htem off. I got it on sale for $0.49 and for the price consider it hardly perfect but more than satisfactory. I wouldn't pay full price for it, though.

(longer version below)
A decent game for a fair price, great for casual gameplay but extremely frustrating when attempting to complete the achievements. Overall well polished but it would benefit from some smaller changes. It has a demo, so that's worth checking out.


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Heavy Memories is at its core a remake of Battle City with a lot more content and complexity pumped into it. It feels very responsive and I like the sound design. The movement is slightly limited due to the tank being only able to move cardinally and having to rotate its track when changing directions. There are 10 levels to pick from and a few different tanks you can play with.

The game overall is quite a positive experience, however it sadly comes with some annoying negative aspects. Maps can be somewhat hard to navigate due to poor lighting and contrast between everything. Powerups expire way too quickly and many achievements are heavily reliant on RNG or good timing, which leads to the average user spending a lot of time trying to earn the mentioned achievements while replaying the same map over and over.

The worst part being that you cannot pick the specific map you want to play, which implies replaying everything until the level you need to complete for the achievement(while I assume this is an intentional feature to add weight to death in the game, it is still frustrating). I do like that the game loads fast and you can get in and out whenever you desire. The change of controls is also very quick and simple.

Heavy Memories is a top down tank combat game that brough back childhood memories of playing Combat on the Atari 2600. It has a relatively old school difficulty curve that rewards learning with more satisfying tank busting action. The subject matter is fairly dark, portraying a war from what seems to be the perspective of the "bad guys." The music is catchy, but the controls feel occassionally clunky and deaths sometimes feel occassionally clunky. The pixel art is quite retro in style, but it doesn't feel charming and I experienced some frustation with visibility issues combined with stage design. A more forgiving extra-life/continue system would have been welcome.

The developer sent me a key for this game and you can see the footage for my gameplay session here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGZIlyEpxY

This game reminds me of the classic NEs title Battle City. Worth a look

Like I have said many times before, all games are worth playing whether for 5 minutes or 5 hours, this is no different for Heavy Memories also! The game resembles any other 8 bit graphics top scroller out there! What is nice is this game offers some options, like turning off the music, selecting controller set-up and continue to play in a small window or full screen.

I would also like the point out that the game has somewhat of a story as well, levels and objectives which lend in to making the game worth playing. However I did find the repetitiveness of the bad graphics between levels rather annoying and of course the higher ended price tag make for its major flaw.

But all in all it is not a bad game, if only the developers would lower the price to reflect the holidays everyday, I am sure they would get way better interest in Heavy Memories. Enjoy, I am!

It definitely feels like Battlecity getting a Story mode. Worths checking out!

Whats to marvel at:
- A simple catchy gameplay. It does a good job of staying fun with a minimum of things to be maintained. You shoot tanks, you break walls, you dodge bullets, you collect temporal boost powerups. You don't have to learn alotta rules and calculate numbers - why, its just an arcade tiny tanks game, easy to get at. Still, there is a challenge to complete, because like in ye games ov old you lose your progress once all the lives are spent - what burns, never returns, they say.
- Good designed missions, arranged into a solid war story. You don't have to do all the same thing over and over again - each mission is a new adventure with its own different objective and its own gameflow - seek&destroy, protect, escape and more... Whats more - they are not linear and often offer different paths to take.
- Cool retro/indie look and badass music. Just check out them trailers and you will get the idea.
- It is cheap af.