Tank Fu Is a Martial Arts Brawler Starring an Actual Tank

A Tank With Moves, Literally

Tanks are already pretty intimidating. Tracks, thick armor, a cannon that can level a building. Most game designers look at that package and figure, yeah, that seems like enough. Knight Owl Games looked at it and thought, what if it also knew kung fu.

Tank Fu, announced August 25, is described on its Steam page as an “experimental over-the-top character action fighting game” where players control a tank and master a full moveset to chase the highest possible score. According to Dexerto, the indie title draws direct inspiration from Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, and Hi-Fi Rush, three games known for rewarding players who can string together stylish, precise, and deeply unhinged attack sequences. The only real difference here is that the protagonist weighs several tons and normally goes about 25 miles per hour on a good road.

What the Tank Can Actually Do

In practice, Tank Fu swaps out the slow deliberate rhythms of armored combat for something much closer to a character action brawler. Players can launch their tank into the air, dash toward enemies, throw punches, chain ground and aerial combos, and close out fights with dramatic cinematic finisher attacks. Each tank comes with more than 16 moves to learn, as reported by Dexerto, which is a number that raises genuine questions about where an armored vehicle is keeping all of that.

The comparison to Devil May Cry is apt and obviously intentional. That series built its reputation on giving players elaborate mechanical tools and then ranking them on how creatively they used those tools mid-fight. Tank Fu is doing the same thing, just with a vehicle that would conventionally be described as a weapon of war rather than a superpowered demon hunter.

What Is Playable Right Now

Knight Owl Games has already released a pre-alpha build on Steam. It is modest in scope but functional as a proof of concept. The build includes a four-arena tutorial designed to teach players most of the available moves, walking them through the basics of what is genuinely a complex system for a game about tanks doing karate.

There is also a five-minute arena mode featuring endless enemies and a leaderboard, which means competitive players can already start chasing scores and comparing results. High score modes live or die on whether the core mechanics feel rewarding to execute repeatedly, and the inspiration list here suggests Knight Owl Games is aiming squarely at that kind of moment-to-moment satisfaction.

The Stranger the Concept, the More It Works

Indie games have been pushing against conventional premises for years. Dexerto notes the genre has already produced a co-op fishing game where players shoot fish, gamble their catch, and battle seagulls, a bus simulator that lets conductors physically fight unruly passengers, and an adventure game built around living life as a pet hamster. Tank Fu fits neatly into that tradition of taking one familiar thing and one wildly incompatible thing and asking whether they belong together.

The honest answer is that absurd premises work in games when the underlying systems are solid. Bayonetta is strange and maximalist, but it is also technically rigorous. If Tank Fu can deliver that same sense of mastery and feedback, the martial arts tank conceit stops being a gimmick and becomes the whole point. That is a real design challenge for a pre-alpha title, and the leaderboard mode is a smart early signal that Knight Owl Games understands what kind of game they are actually trying to make.