Great!, I find these games addicting.

Bloody hell, I really love the sound of this game and, once again, flipping armorgames won't work for me! Grrr. Why does this keep happening? That's the last 3 armorgames that don't work for me now.

@ThenAgain
Try Kongregrate. Either that or clear your history/delete the Armor Games pages. My last computer used to hate Armor Games, but I'm pretty sure the games worked after I cleared their history from my cache.

Looks fun: will play it when I have some more time.

Shouldn't this game have the tag bubbletanks?

[Thanks. Fixed. -Jay]

Arrow keys and mouse are both on the right. I only have one right hand.
And about the WASD keys, they're unplayable on a french keyboard.

[Have you tried sliding the keyboard a little bit over to the left? That works for me. -Jay]

Sadly I get the same problem wherever the game is.
However, it works fine in a different browser :D
A fun but, unfortunately, laggy game.

I had some trouble too.
This game loaded slowly and was extremely sluggish to play. Don't know if the problem is the new content or something on my end, but bubble tanks 2 loaded and played fine(in fact it moved like lightning in comparison), and I wasn't having trouble with other Armor games. I'm using Firefox.

An odd design that works out well, requires 5 gun ports, 27 bubbles, and class 4 design

Either shoot from a distance, or envelop enemies and shoot within, spare rounds will fly out hopefully hitting something else

Okay, as much as I loved Bubble Tanks and Bubble Tanks 2, I'm kind of ashamed to admit that Bubble Tanks Arenas is...well, boring.

I've made it all the way through the end of Arena 18, with a tank that is nothing more than a single Tiny Bubble, the best primary weapon I've unlocked, and Shields...and I'm still ending each fight with full health.

There's one issue that really cheapens the gameplay here, and unfortunately, it's inherent to the basic design of BTA: you can't leave the bubble until the fight is over. While this might be a good idea in theory, this instead enables the strategy of skimming the outer edge of the bubble and spamming bullets towards its center. You can't get outflanked or surrounded, and dodging is much easier.

On top of this, BTA seems to deviate from the earlier games, where firepower and health were directly tied to tank size. In BT and BT2, once you reached a certain size you had to rely on charging in with guns blazing in hopes of taking out your opponents before being damaged to the point that your firepower suffered. Here, you can have a teeny tiny tank with very good firepower (well, as good as one gun can get, at least) while still being relatively hard to hit.

In addition, the Spread-5 cannon, once unlocked, is a great defensive weapon when it comes down to shooting down seekers or...leeches? vampires? Whatever they're called (Level 17+).

As a result of all of this, this really makes BTA considerably easier than the earlier games.

I played about 15 minutes before I quit, bored. While the customization options are neat, they don't make up for the exploration and pace of the earlier titles. There's a certain thrill in taking on tanks out of your league. This feels like a step backwards, towards generic arena shooters.

It's exceptionally linear. Each arena unlocks after the previous one, and you always head to the right until all enemies are vanquished. With the preset tanks, I'm not even motivated to make my own each time I get a new weapon. It's too bad, because I really love the other bubbletanks games.

I confess my disappointment with the game. I enjoyed the first game, and the second game was superb, but this one just seems lacking. I found it a rather boring grind, in truth.

This was largely the fault of the new mechanics. The first two games were free-form, you could progress at whatever difficulty ramp you wanted. In BTA, the enemies never posed a challenge. Also, the quality of the enemies was different. In BTA, I found the levels to mostly be extremely slow, thanks to the fact that, though the enemies could never harm me, it took forever for my weaponry to make a dent in their armor. Perhaps it's not actually any slower than in the other games, I don't know, but it was surely a more boring time.

Also, the design-your-own aspect of tank building. The prebuilt tanks are woefully weak, albeit cool looking. When building your own and trying to optimize power, there's no reason not to make it as small as possible, which can be finicky. The clear inferiority of some weapons can be infuriating, and the opening of the tank-building to the user limits the more creative options, like most of the high-end tanks from BTII.

The game is just so much slower, less eventful, and unfortunately less free than its predecessors. It's not bad, but I don't think I'd play it again.

I agree with the above few comments. I actually found my self falling asleep while playing it. At 3pm. It was more tedious than anything. The idea has potential, but as it is, it doesn't work.

It has a lot of flaws. It's still a good game, but updates ARE required.

Some suggestions: The ability to put text in bubble arenas (Boss approaching, you're almost there, short bits like that)

Being able to create arenas with multiple paths. This would give the ability to create arenas with different difficulcy choices and remove some linearity.

Variable arena size. And I don't mean the amount of bubble fields, I mean the fields themselves. Shape could also be in there, but that kind of removes the bubble idea.

Obstacles within arenas. I mean, unpassable walls. In conjunction with BIG arenas, you could almost make a level, kind of!

Varying appearance as health drops. Okay, this'd be hard to implement, but if you truly have to make an advanced tools section, this'd be one of my top suggestions.

Last but not least... less computer killing. Okay, my computer is fairly heavy duty, so I haven't got lag, but I still think the transitions between fields and movements aren't... smooth. Some people might also have got the problem of lag, so this needs to be worked on.

Like I said, a good game, but still flawed.

Ha!
the last stage is 'awesome'!

seriously, you fail

@Dora: Thanks for the tip about Google Chrome. What a difference!!

Just out of curiosity anyone else on a Mac have the problem where you can't the click allow/deny buttons or the close in the settings tab? Tried suggestions on the web but nothing seems to have worked so far...

Seemed very sluggish on my Mac too. First I had to click 'Next' a few times after clicking Allow on the storage request, then I got stuck in the first arena as it said I had to kill everything but there was nothing left to kill. But it really is very slow: a few fps with the music breaking up, even though I had nothing else running at the time.

Whoa is me. I have not been able to play one single flash game this week. Using any one of the three browsers installed on this old box. FF, IE or Chrome. The latest flash version is installed (10.0.45.2). If I download the swf file I can play it locally or use FF to open it and play it. What gives?

My tank design

I never found a need to grow beyond tier 1 but that could just be my strafe heavy play-style

I think we've seen enough of this series. Overly simplistic gameplay combined with the mechanics and graphics that just about every aspiring game programmer tries first: balls that shoot. Add enough flash bloat and you have Bubble Tanks.

@Spoon

I like this bubbletanks best, mainly because I love customising more than "Fly around like an idiot through bubbles while shooting". But, even with this, I agree that this series needs to die. Quickly. With a stake in its chest. I will poo blood if I see a third. Seriusly.

What a dumb game concept.

And now Dora's got me thinking about

Yeah, this game is really boring. I stopped moving at some point in the game (around the seventh arena) and still won every arena, AND still got enough bubbles to go back to full health.

Borrrring.

My level one tank...

Needs 6 gun points, 31 bubbles. Have fun!

...If you want more difficulty, why not use a less efficient tank design?

On the other hand, leech tank part is broken.

Very good game. Needs a free play mode, so you can just have infinite BP and GP, so you can have a bit of fun. Also, you guys need to make a Bubble Tanks Arenas app for the App Store! Using the iPhone/iPod Touch's pinch controls and with a simple arrow keys in the left corner, shoot key in the right, you could make an awesome app. And the great thing about that for you is that $1.19 for everyone who buys it!

copy this:
L10000019
Then edit it then click save and exit then youl have the agile Tank!
its really easy to have it

Fun game,and the 'heavyweight' lvl is a long lvl, and my tank

its cool and i got bored...

Yes, I agree with Spoon and Turnip's comments above. The idea of "Bubble Tanks" is a good concept for one game but attempting to extend it into a series is madness. When the first BT game was released, it was seen as pretty novel. When the second was released, it was enjoyable. Now Hero Interactive is beating this simple concept to death by making an unbearably boring "Arenas" game and threatening to extend it even to BT3.

I think this concept does not lend itself to a full-blown series, only to full-blown boredom. I agree with most of the criticisms here and I urge Hero Interactive not to devote the majority of their time to developing a hackneyed concept whose fans are quickly becoming the minority.

It's time to walk away from shooting circles to some games that are actually original, challenging, and fun.

I disagree.

It is entirely clear to me that BTA is different from other BT games. HeroInteractive told us already. Number three is going to be back to the ways of the first two. BTA is simply another genre. Live with it.

Harold Zoid: A10018572

If the game is laggy, you should try turning on "Efficiency mode" under settings.

i see several problems, it could use some fine tuning
however, YOU GUYS NEED TO STOP RAGGING ON IT
it isn't supposed to be perfect, it's supposed to be testing out some features for BT3 that need to be fixed and perfected...

i figured out why it laggs :)

the reason why its lagging is cuz the game is linked to the internet with all the updated models from different users. the reason it laggs is because its loading all of those different tanks from the internet. what ive learned is, don't click on search tanks, just make your own :P and it wont go into that hole loading process page by page making massive lag :x.

Have you tried this?

Considering this is a game where they're just testing concepts for BT3, pretty good. Not that good as a standalone game, but still...

the game sucked
but wait:the spoiler below is important!

Here's something awesome i found:

Can anyone help me, I downloaded the swf file of this on softpedia, I have flash pro 8 and it doesn't work. I have Opera, Firefox, Ie8 and Safari. When I open it it keeps blinking with all the parts amnd weapons on the same spot saying in a red rectangle 'LOAD_CONTAINER'. Please help :D

I'm using windows 7 now, maybe it will work on my vista and 7.