Video Game / Armor Blitz

Recapture Factoria!

Armor Blitz is a free-to-play mobile and browser game developed by Hainet. The gameplay consists of a mixture of Card Collection and tug-of-war lane based combat. In the game, the player takes the role of the General and is assigned to retake the continent of Factoria from the forces of the Corruption with your army of Moe Anthropomorphic tank girls. Each girl represents a tank from the WWI to Cold war era. The game is single player, featuring a full story mode as well as individual relationship stories for certain characters.

The game was released in 2016 and is accessible on Android with the NSFW web version available on Nutaku.

Shutdown of the servers was announced on 5 May, 2021, with full shutdown taking place on 30 April, 2021.

This work contains examples of:

• Ace Custom: Due to the way the game is balanced, there are several tanks ingame which are so high above the power curve that the way the player uses them can alone dictate if the game will be a victory or a defeat.
• Achilles' Heel: There are 3 ways a tank can defend itself, High HP, high Armor and High Evasion. Each tank usually excels at one or 2 of these and will be vulnerable to other types of attacks.
• Allegedly Free Game: Despite the game being free to play, players who spend real money on the game will have a massive advantage compared to a free rider, that said the game is mostly a single player and this does not affect the balance of the game, Except for the leaderboard mode.
• Alpha Strike: Units like Katyusha or Panzerwerfer are generally weak but their 1-time use skill has the higher damage potential in the entire game. Being able to take down even the strongest bosses all by themselves.
• Alternate Universe: The action takes place in the land of Factoria where weapons become anthropomoprhized. Tanks and vehicles become girls and small firearms become small animals such as cats and rabbit infantry.
• And Your Reward Is Edible: You can earn candies which are used to advance your relationship with the girls.
• Anti-Gravity Clothing: Tortoise and Type 59 have a few floating armor plates which move around their bodies and can be seen arranging themselves as shields when the character's skill is used.
• Area of Effect: The High Explosive Shell passive skill gives this to a tank's attacks. The staple of artillery, but can also be found on other tanks.
• Armor Is Useless: A character’s defensive stats have no correlation to the amount of armor each girl is wearing.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The Penetration stat determines what percentage of the enemy's armor is ignored by the tank's attack. Typically found on tank destroyers, though emblems can boost this on other tanks.
• BFG: Some high-rarity characters are capable of dealing huge amounts of damage with a single shot or a single salvo. Characters like Katyusha, Panzerwerfer, S-51, Fv 4005 Stage II and others.
• Boring, but Practical: Due to the somewhat Schizophrenic Difficulty of the game, there are battles which give a lot of experience and gold for their difficulty. Since repairing a tank after fighting becomes more expensive the higher the level of the tank, it is way more practical to play battles that are easy but boring rather than playing the more engaging, more difficult, and more expensive ones.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Jagdtiger Odette, which is portrayed as a being very lazy, while at the same time being one of the strongest characters.
• Cast Herd: Since the game features over 100 characters with almost 30 of them having an expanded story, they end up being split based on their type, nation, or role.
• Cast of Personifications :Almost all cutscenes ingame feature the tank girls having conversations with each other, and sometimes these conversations have historical connotations.
• Com Mons: 1* and 2* tanks are extremely abundant throughout the game. Eventually, even 3* tanks become this as the you progress.
• Commonplace Rare: Some of 5* Medium and Light tanks are actually very common in real-life. The T-62, for example, had over 22,000 units produced and exported through eastern bloc countries. In this game, Yuliya the T-62 has less than 1% chance to appear from a standard gacha pull.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Since the AI is rudimentary, the opposing faction has a lot of advantages over the player which become more evident as the player progresses through the game. Advantages such as, more units in a squad, defensive buildings, access to higher levelled units, access to unique units which are generally much stronger than the regular ones, the ability to have duplicate units in the squad, up to 10 times the HP, much higher firepower, and even a full map stun which costs nothing to use and can be used every few shots.
• Color Codedfor Your Convenience: The tank cards have color-coded backgrounds based on their type: blue for light tanks, green for medium tanks, yellow for heavy tanks, red for tank destroyers and purple for artillery.
• Covert Pervert: Rachel, one of the main character, bribes one of the characters in order to be able to peep at one of the other main characters in their changing room.
• Critical Existence Failure: Not only will a character perform at maximum capacity at 1 HP during a battle, but a character that has not died in battle does not require any repairs afterwards, regardless of how much damage it took.
• Critical Hit: The Game features a critical hit mechanic based on Luck; some tanks can perform much better if the player uses the emblem system to boost their ability to deal critical hits or the damage dealt by these hits.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: All light tanks have the Armor Shred passive skill, which reduces a tank's Armor with every attack for 10 seconds. This is best used as part of a group; don't expect them to solo a heavy tank.
• Death or Glory Attack: Due to the win conditions of the game, depending on the defences the enemy has its possible to use "assassin" Tanks to sneak past the defences in order to finish the boss swiftly. However, this tactic is usually very risky and involves a significant dedication of resources. If the attack fails, the player may not be able to recover.
• Eldritch Abomination: It is not yet known what the Corruption enemies are exactly, while some of them seem like the decayed version of other tank girls while some of them are monsters with crystals, claws and giant tentacles.
• Epic Tank-on-Tank Action: The whole point of the game, with a healthy dose of Moe added into the mix.
• Equipment Upgrade: The game features the Emblems which serve as Equipment for the tanks, and they can be upgraded using ingame currency.
• Eyepatch of Power: Maus, one of the strongest defensive units ingame has an eyepatch on her left eye, that said her Range is average for a Heavy tank.
• Fake Difficulty: There are many instances in which the game contains Fake Difficulty. This is mostly because of the advantages that the Opponent is given, as well as some of the level design.
• Fake Longevity: While the game does not artificially inflate the playtime too much, it is still a perpetual design game that uses an energy system (Oil and Metal in this case), and there are some instances of Backtracking involved due to the rate at which the enemy levels up compared to the speed at which the player levels up.
• Fragile Speedster: T50, Comet, Cromwell III, T50, and M5 Stuart, which have less durability but are exceptionally fast with their ability that can also grant them high evasion.
• Glass Cannon: Panzerwerfer and Katyusha, which can deal a devastating amount of damage with their Rocket Barrage ability but are extremely vulnerable to any sort of damage.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The game is at the core a collectable game, and as with any collectable game, a player is encouraged to obtain as many unique units as possible.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: in the early game, bosses have as much or sometimes less HP than most units on the field, the challenge is to get to them and once a player's units are in range and locked on the boss, it's pretty much a guaranteed win.
• Historical In-Joke: After defeating the enemy fortress commander Maginot, Evie thinks it would have been easier if they had just gone around her. ^{Historical note} In World War II, France had fortifications along the border with Germany called the Maginot Line. Instead of attacking it, Germany invaded Belgium (Just as Planned) and then crossed into France over the Ardennes, an area of forests and rough terrain (Not As Planned).
  Renee: A-around it? But she seemed so big and strong! If it was me, I would be as confident as her too!
• Hotter and Sexier: The Nutaku version has R18 scenes compared to the normal version of the game.
• Improbably Female Cast: All the characters in the game are girls, excluding the cat infantry and the general.
• Joke Character: Private Neko was given out as a joke character to the beta testers. However, in the old meta, it proved to be very useful since it had the lowest cost and the highest evasion of all characters.
• Luck-Based Mission: While the gameplay is highly tactical, it is often difficult to execute on a strategy due to the high randomness level of the enemy behaviour, High-level fights can be lost just due to having the bad luck when it comes to the way the enemy deploys its units.
• Level Grinding: Because of the perpetual design of the game, there is a lot of grinding required to level up your units. This gets heavily noticeable at higher levels, where getting a new level 1 tank will take more and more time to be levelled up to a point where it can be better than anything the player currently has in its squad.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: Each girl represents a military vehicle from the WWI to Cold War Era.
• Marry Them All: While not strictly a marriage, the romance system is available for all tank girls, though not every one of them has their story written.
• Mildly Military: Even if the world of Factoria is at war, most of the Romance stories of the characters have them go about their daily lives and interactions with general as if the war does not even exist.
• Military Moe: What KanColle was for ships, this game is for tanks.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Private Neko and Private Victor, both are cat infantry that help you in the game. Enemy cat and rabbit infantry are also spotted in battles sometimes.
• Nitro Boost: Some of the Assassin type tanks have speed buffs that make them very fast for short duration of time, some can even move across the entire battlefield in a less than 3 seconds
• Older Than They Look: Since these tank girls technically reincarnations of real tanks, some of them may be much older than they look if the frame of reference is current real-world time.
• Play Every Day: Having low oil reserve capacity, a player that does not play daily loses a significant amount of playtime.At the same time, factory and scouting have long timers attached to them, giving more reason to play every day.
• Power Equals Rarity: 5-Star tanks are usually more powerful than their lower tiered counterparts.
• Random Number God: Almost every aspect of the game is linked to RNG. emblem and tank acquisition, emblem upgrading and stats, the order at which your tanks come in battle, the enemies you will be facing as well as their positioning and scouting.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Despite the fact that the game world is being corrupted, the main characters often show signs of unprofessionalism.
• The Rival: Rena And Tabby may be sisters, but they are always trying to outdo each other in order to attract the general's attention.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Since anything that is not a heavy is particularly squishy, artillery and other AOE units with long range are very useful at quickly reducing the enemy numbers.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: There are many elements that cause the difficulty curve to spike either upwards or downwards. The enemies you will face in any battles you go against have a fixed level and higher level difficulties also have higher rarity tanks, thus giving the enemy a considerable amount of extra power. That said there are some maps at high levels which either have no emplacements or the enemies you will have are of lower rarity, making those battle very easy and are favoured by the player base as being good experience farming zones.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The fights with the enemy bosses become progressively harder as the player progresses through the game campaign.
• Sentai: The player has the freedom to chose which tanks he wishes to take in battle (given that he has obtained them) and can arrange them in a squadron of minimum 4 and maximum 15.
• Sailor Fuku: Setsuko(Type-97 Chi-Ha) is wearing a uniform reminiscent of a Sailor Fuku in her default skin.
• Sarashi: Emiko(Type-95) is wearing a Sarashi in her default skin.
• Schmuck Bait: In the current meta, some 5* tanks can be considered weaker than even some 4* tanks, making the player use subpar tanks just because they have a higher rarity.
• Starter Equipment: The player's choice in Lieutenant determines which tanks are available at the very start. The types differ, but you always get a 4* Medium and two 2* vehicles.
• Stop Poking Me!: Characters will get annoyed at times when you keep pressing them on the main menu.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: All characters that have active skills will have their full portrait (or skin) displayed during combat when their skill is activated.
• Token Mini-Moe: Hetzer, one of the youngest characters in the game.
• Unflinching Walk: Discussed after completing the Slash and Burn tile (lots of Churchill and Sherman Crocodiles).
  Evie: It's too hot in here! So much fire and heat is bad for my skin.
  Rachel: Oh, stop complaining! The amount of Crocodile tanks was crazy! But then I turned away and started strutting out... and then *WHOOOOSH* a burst of flame! Everyone knows cool girls don't look at explosions.
  Natalia: Are you trying to say that you are 'cool'?
  Rachel: Naturally.
• Unwinnable by Design: The Portal of chaos is designed to be an infinite survival mode thus no matter how far a player can advance it can never fully complete it.
• Veteran Unit: All units can be advanced to an elite version. The Player has to progress their relationship to a certain level, obtain a few duplicates and spend some ingame currency in order to elite a unit. These units gain a significant stat boost.
• World of Action Girls: With the exception of the general and the infantry, there are no other male characters in the entire game.
• Yandere: The Soviet tank destroyers all have obsessive personalities towards the General.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: You can gain more resources from capturing resource nodes on the map, but it is common for Generals to run low on Oil.