🔵 Tank Arena io

An io tank game you can play on your own

Tank Arena io is an io-style tank game with all the fun of the genre and none of the strangers. You drive a little round tank into a huge grid arena full of floating shapes and other tanks. Shoot the shapes to earn experience, level up, make your tank stronger and eventually turn it into something much scarier. Every other tank in the arena is a computer-controlled bot with its own name, its own favourite upgrades and its own plans, so the arena feels busy and alive, but there is no chat, no login and no one online. It is just you, the bots and the leaderboard.

A run starts at level 1 and ends when your tank is knocked out. The best runs climb all the way to level 30 and the top of the leaderboard. Your best score is saved, and it unlocks two more arenas to play in.

How to play

Move with W, A, S and D (or the arrow keys). Your tank's gun follows the mouse, and holding the mouse button or Space fires. Press E to switch on auto-fire if you would rather just steer and aim. The yellow bar at the bottom fills with experience; every time it fills up you reach a new level, and a panel of six stats appears so you can spend your upgrade point. On phones and tablets, the left touch stick moves and the right stick aims and fires.

Shapes are the main source of experience. Yellow squares are easy and worth 10 XP, red triangles take a few more hits and give 25, and big blue pentagons are tough but worth 130. Most pentagons float in the glowing area in the middle of the arena, which makes it the best place to level up quickly, and also the place where the biggest bot tanks like to hang out.

Six stats

Each level gives you one point to put into a stat, up to seven points per stat. Armour raises your tank's maximum health. Repair makes it heal faster (and every tank heals much faster after a while without being hit). Shell Power makes your shells hit harder and push through more shapes. Shell Speed makes them fly faster and further. Reload lets you fire more often, and Engine makes your tank quicker. There are not enough points to max everything, so every run you decide what kind of tank you are building: a tough brawler, a glass cannon, or a fast hit-and-run machine.

Evolve your tank

At level 10 you can turn your Rookie tank into one of four new classes. The Twin has two barrels side by side, the Sniper has a long barrel, fast hard-hitting shells and a wider view, the Machine Gun sprays lots of small shells, and the Trapper lays spiky traps that sit still and block anything that comes near. At level 20 each of those can evolve again. The Twin becomes the Quad Gun (shooting in four directions) or the Triple Shot, the Sniper becomes the Long Shot or the Hunter (which fires two shells one after the other), the Machine Gun becomes the Spray Master or the Boomer (one giant slow shell), and the Trapper becomes the Mine Layer or the Fortress (traps behind and a gun in front).

The bot tanks

Choose how busy the arena is before you start: Chill has ten bots with wobbly aim, Normal has fifteen, and Wild has twenty bots with sharp aim that are brave enough to chase much bigger tanks. Bots farm shapes, level up, put points into stats and evolve just like you. They also fight each other and they fight you. A bot that is badly hurt will try to run away, and a big bot will happily hunt smaller ones. Knocking out a tank, bot or not, gives you 40 percent of its score, which is why a high-level tank is such a tempting target.

Tips for a high score

Spend your first few levels farming squares and triangles at the edge of the arena, where there are fewer big tanks. Put early points into Armour, Repair and Reload, then build the rest of your tank around the class you plan to pick. Keep an eye on the leaderboard and the minimap: once a tank reaches level 15 it shows up on the minimap as a coloured dot, so you can see the big tanks coming. Shells cancel each other out, so firing at an incoming stream of shells can block it. And never chase a tank into the middle of a crowd of others.

Play on any device

Tank Arena io runs in the browser on computers, Chromebooks, tablets and phones, with no download, no account and no online play. Your best score, best level and unlocked arenas are saved only on your own device. Knocked-out tanks simply burst into bits of colour; there are no people in the game. Grown-ups can read more on the Parents & Safety page.

More tank games

Like upgrading your tank? Try the 30-mission campaign of Tank Upgrade Arena, or battle friends on one keyboard in Tank Maze Duel. Every tank game is on the Tank Games page, and if you like io games, fly into Copter Arena or grow in Snake Battle Royale.

Frequently asked questions