Gamescom is very good at making ridiculous ideas feel completely normal. You can spend ten minutes discussing photorealistic lighting, move two booths down to explore an alien ecosystem where survival means learning to preserve it rather than conquer it, and then suddenly find yourself staring at a tank with wings and a giant hammer. That was roughly how I discovered Drone Tanks in Cologne during Gamescom 2026, where I met Tristan Gybels from Ludum Elite, a young international studio headquartered in Belgium. Tristan walked me through the prototype and the team’s plans for the game.
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Tanks are usually associated with weight, armour and not particularly agile movement. This one appeared to have looked at all those expectations and decided that what the genre really needed was flight, melee combat and less respect for gravity. What the team brought to Gamescom was still very much a prototype, and they were refreshingly open about that during our conversation. Some systems already have a clear direction, while others are still being designed or reconsidered, and several answers came with an important qualification: we’re still working on that.
For an interview, that’s actually a rather interesting place to arrive. Instead of being walked through a nearly finished game with most decisions already locked, I was seeing it while many of them were still being made. The foundations were playable and the central idea was obvious. Nonetheless, visitors could already jump in and test their skills, and those who managed to beat the stage were honourably rewarded with a cute little plushie.
So, What Exactly Is Drone Tanks?
At its foundation, Drone Tanks is a fast-paced roguelite shooter. You enter combat arenas, survive waves of hostile machines, improve your build and eventually work your way toward a boss. Nothing especially unusual there.
Then you look at the tank. Calling it a tank almost feels unfair.
It has cannons, certainly, but it can also launch itself into the air and carries a massive hammer for close-range attacks. That hammer has special abilities of its own, while upgrades and a skill tree are intended to push the machine further as you progress. Instead of the slow, heavily armoured vehicle I instinctively associate with tank games, this one treats its protagonist more like a mechanical superhero that happens to have tracks. If you ever played Overwatch, then the game pace is something similar to Genji style, except you are not a cyber ninja, but a tank. The team describes this as a “superpowered” take on tank combat, and after seeing the game, that description makes considerably more sense. The point isn’t simply to make a tank faster. It is to remove many of the usual assumptions about what a tank should be allowed to do.
The machines you’re fighting have plenty of variety as well. Many resemble insects — beetle-like drones being one example I saw during the demo — while others take more humanoid forms. And underneath all this mechanical violence sits a surprisingly cute reason for doing it: you’re rescuing creatures called Gemlings. They’ve been captured by the drones, and getting them back provides the basic motivation behind all the shooting, flying and hammering.
More Than Guns on Treads
Giving a tank wings and a giant hammer is one thing. Making all that hardware work together in combat is another. The guns in the Gamescom build were powerful, but they couldn’t be fired forever. Keep shooting and eventually they overheat, leaving them to recover — usually a good moment to remember the enormous hammer attached to the tank.
Some enemies reinforce this naturally. Certain drones can take plenty of gunfire but are much more vulnerable up close, while others grapple the tank and pull it toward them. Add exploding bots to an already crowded arena, and sitting at a comfortable distance shooting everything becomes increasingly difficult. At one point Tristan summed it up neatly: “You really have to use your hammer.” The hammer comes with its own abilities, including attacks that can stun enemies and fire projectiles, while the wings let the tank leave the ground and quickly reposition.
The result is combat designed around fluid movement and adaptation without locking the player into one particular approach. Guns, melee and flight remain available depending on the situation, while handling the tank aggressively and staying mobile appears to pay off as the arena gets busier. The three waves and boss shown at Gamescom were a relatively small sample of the combat, but they demonstrated how the wings, weapons and giant hammer can function together as parts of the same machine.
Fight, Upgrade, Die, Come Back Stronger
The roguelite structure surrounding all this mechanical chaos is considerably more familiar. The basic loop is straightforward: fight, upgrade, choose a path and repeat. Combat is divided into relatively short arena encounters, with resources collected along the way and a shop appearing between fights. In the Gamescom build, coins earned during combat could be spent there on upgrades before moving on.
Death ends the run. There were no checkpoints in the prototype, although starting again doesn’t mean losing everything. Progression is split between temporary upgrades collected during a run and a permanent layer connected to the lobby and skill tree (the ‘lite’ portion of the roguelite). Individual runs introduce randomized choices and item synergies, while persistent upgrades gradually carry progress forward between attempts.
There is already plenty to build around because the tank itself combines ranged weapons, hammer attacks and unusual mobility. Different upgrades can push those elements and overall playstyle in different directions, allowing a run to favor firepower, melee, movement or survivability while keeping the same machine underneath. The planned route system adds another choice between encounters, with different paths affecting difficulty, risk and potentially how a build develops.
Overall, all those systems combined can turn an already unreasonable tank into something even more unreasonable — and considerably more fun. There seems to be plenty of room for replayability here, especially as different weapons, upgrades and paths start producing different builds. Of course, at this stage of development there wasn’t much point in asking exactly how many weapons and modifications will eventually make it into the game, but the team certainly doesn’t seem short on ideas. Tristan made it quite clear that their backlog is already a long one.
When the Boss Starts Listening to the Music
As if tank combat, superhero abilities and roguelite progression weren’t enough, the game also borrows something from rhythm games. Music can become part of the fight itself, and the Gamescom build demonstrated this with the wonderfully literal Disco Boss — a large mechanical machine with a disco-ball aesthetic whose movements and attacks follow the soundtrack. As Tristan explained: “All our boss battles will be synchronized with music.” Once the rhythm becomes familiar, the soundtrack itself can provide another clue about what the boss is about to do.
The plans extend beyond boss fights. Enemy spawns and other arena events may also follow the soundtrack, potentially making timing an important part of combat. It is an interesting direction because changing the music can change the pace and character of an encounter without rebuilding the basic combat around it. The Disco Boss offered only an early example of the idea, but it was enough to show what the team is aiming for.
Defeating the boss also revealed one of the Gemlings trapped inside. Tristan described the poor creature as “traumatized”: after everything it had been through, it was frightened and would run away whenever the tank approached. Rescue therefore required catching up, stunning it — with the hammer, because of course — and finally bringing it to safety. My sophisticated journalistic reaction during the demonstration was approximately Poor baby. It was a small detail, but a nice one: rescuing a Gemling became part of the encounter instead of simply a reward appearing after the boss went down. Although I did forget to ask one rather important question: after an adrenaline-filled boss fight, what happens if you fail to catch the little thing?
Saving the Universe
There is more behind the Gemlings than being adorable creatures in need of rescue. According to the current lore, the security robots now hunting and capturing them were originally built to protect and serve them.
Something clearly went rather wrong.
The machines are now exploiting the Gemlings’ energy, while our increasingly improbable superhero tank travels across the universe trying to get them back. Tristan described the story behind all this as “pretty complex,” with more lore and events planned around the creatures and whatever happened between them and their former protectors. Rescued Gemlings will also gather at the player’s base, making the progress through the campaign visible as more of them are brought home. The team is experimenting with giving them abilities or bonuses as well, although that system is still taking shape.
The journey itself is planned to stretch across several planets and environments. Tristan mentioned canyons, deserts and mines filled with lava, while one of the more unusual locations shown was a Zeppelin graveyard suspended in the air. Combined with the different routes and roguelite progression, that should give the campaign plenty of room to move beyond a succession of similar arenas. So yes, somewhere underneath the flying tank, giant hammer, disco bosses and treatment of gravity, there is a story about saving the universe. It just happens to begin with bringing some very cute little creatures home.
A Prototype With a Much Bigger Destination
For now, the team’s priority is clear. As Tristan put it: “First we’re aiming to complete the campaign, to complete the storyline.” Multiplayer comes later, once the worlds, enemies and progression are further along. During our conversation, he roughly estimated a public demo at around a year and a half away, with a possible full release around two years away. I wouldn’t put either date into a calendar just yet — these were estimates discussed around an early prototype, not announced release dates.
Beyond the campaign, co-op is very much part of the plan. Split-screen is intended to come first, with online multiplayer potentially following later. The team has even experimented with a competitive Team Deathmatch-style mode, although PvP sits much further down the priority list. All of that puts Drone Tanks firmly on the PvE side for now, which I personally appreciate quite a lot. The focus is on building the campaign and fighting alongside another player, not turning every interesting combat system into another reason to shoot each other. I think that order makes sense. Finish the campaign, get the combat and progression where they need to be, then put another tank beside mine. Because two players developing completely different builds and throwing a pair of flying armoured vehicles into the same arena sounds wonderfully chaotic!
There are plenty of questions left between this prototype and the game Ludum Elite wants to build, but I’m curious to see where that strange collection of ideas ends up. If you like what you’ve seen so far, I recommend visiting the Drone Tank’s Steam page and smashing that wishlist button. For a young project, those wishlists are a useful signal that people are interested — something that can help when looking for publishing support and, just as importantly, give the creators another reason to keep pushing their ridiculous tank forward.
Then again, bolting things onto a tank because they sound cool appears to be how we got the hammer in the first place. And I’m certainly not asking them to take that off.
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