If you’ve ever watched someone play an old PlayStation game and wondered why their character keeps spinning around in circles, congratulations, you’ve already met tank controls. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s your quick introduction: With tank controls, pressing up moves your character forward in whatever direction they’re facing, and pressing left or right only rotates them, so with the stick alone, you can’t sidestep or turn on a dime. That’s manageable in a hallway. It’s much less so when you’re sneaking past a guard, lining up a shot, or timing a leap across a pit, which is why the same scheme caused trouble in just about every genre during the PS1 era. These eight classic games are the hardest to go back to, whether the culprit is tank controls or something else entirely.
8
Tomb Raider (1996)
The dealbreaker: Lining up one jump means turning in place, backing up, taking a run-up, and holding a grab button in midair. Every single time
Reminder: Tomb Raider is a platformer. You’re jumping roughly every 15 seconds, and most of those jumps demand precision measured in single pixels. The tank controls were supposed to help players thread that needle, but they also meant holding down a series of buttons in a specific order at perfectly timed moments, every few seconds, over the course of a whole game. Here’s what a “big” jump looked like in practice: Walk to the edge, hop back once, run forward, jump at the last second, and hold the grab button while in the air. All while counting the number of blocks you’re jumping around and using specific button combinations for standing, running, and walking jumps. If you guess wrong, game over.
The good news is that Aspyr’s 2024 remaster lets you switch to modern controls, with the camera on the right stick, or keep the classic scheme if you’re feeling brave. A full remake, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, will be released in February 2027. In the meantime, take comfort in the one polite thing Lara does: she’ll never walk off an edge, though she’ll happily run directly off one.
7
Fear Effect (2000)
The dealbreaker: A fear meter instead of a health bar, and a game that punishes you for running out of ammo.
In a shooter, running out of ammo is a special kind of stressful. Here, you’ll follow three mercenaries as they chase a supernatural conspiracy through Hong Kong in 2050. What starts as a job to retrieve a Triad boss’s daughter turns into a descent into a surreal version of hell, with Triads, zombies, and demons along your journey. Get spotted or take a hit, and your character’s fear will climb. Helpfully, so will the danger you’re dodging. Fear Effect uses tank controls, which trap you more often than they allow you to run. A 2025 re-release from Limited Run Games made the tank controls optional, and added widescreen, rewind, and save states. It’s maybe the nicest thing anyone has done for tank controls: Made them optional.
6
Resident Evil (1996)
The dealbreaker: A zombie in the next room, and a camera angle that can’t see it.
Not being able to see a threat lurking around the corner is possibly the point; it does heighten the terror in this game significantly. Resident Evil helped define the survival horror genre, and the fixed camera angles are part of that. You steer Jill or Chris, two members of the Raccoon City police’s elite S.T.A.R.S. unit who get trapped in a mansion infested with zombies, with tank controls — which means “forward” always means forward for the character, regardless of the camera angle you’re working in. That consistency helps when the view cuts every time you cross a doorway, but combat suffers, since you’re lining up shots at things you often can’t see. Your stiff, complex movements don’t help either.
If you want the original experience, the Director’s Cut, which adds analog stick support, is available on PS Plus Premium. If you want the best way to play the first game, though, the 2002 remake (and its 2015 HD remaster) features a rebuilt mansion with new graphics, lighting, and revised layouts.
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