Diep.io (aka Tank.io for iPhone) review, tactics and strategy: this is the new addictive thing after Slither.io

The rules of Diep.io are simple: you move around using your keyboard and shoot by clicking the left mouse button (if you are playing on desktop). Simple right?

Well, not so fast: you have countless ways to develop your tank and at first you will be shooting at the randomly floating particles in the world: the yellow squares give you the least points, then you have the red triangles for a few more points and the blue pentagons will donate the largest amount of points.

So what are the possible development strategies? It seems that there are two ways to start developing your tank: as a gunner, or as a ram.

Here are the eight skills that you can improve:

All of these are self explanatory, maybe except for body damage which is the category that you improve and can just bump into other things inflicting damage upon them.

So how do you win at Diep.io? Well, it's not as fast as you do in Slither.io, but it's just as much fun.

There is one general rule in Diep.io that is the exact opposite of Slither.io: MOVE AWAY from the bigs. At least in the beginning, when you are weak, but even when you become big, fighting with other bigs is the only sure way to die.

We outlay two strategies focusing on two different approaches

Kill particles and other tanks by ramming into them (use Body damage!)

In order to destroy things with your body, you can focus on putting points into the 'Body damage' skill. The strategy here is to shoot particles with the gun until you reach about level 5. At that point, you can add points to the Body damage, Max health and Health regen categories. With enough health and body damage, you can start ramming into things more aggressively. This will reduce your health, so we recommend to continue upping your Health Regen and Max health a couple of notches, but then quickly focus on improving your Movement speed.

These are the four key categories that you can use to make your tank a fast and deadly machine bumping into things. We recommend you continue shooting from your gun and even add a point or two to the bullet speed and bullet damage categories to fool opponents into thinking you are a gunner type of a tank. This way they will more easily allow you to get closer when you can surprise them by ramming full force into them.

This is a good strategy to win against small and medium tanks, but when fighting against the bigs, you will see that it is extremely hard to get close to them to exert body damage. That's why this strategy is best used against small and medium opponents.

You can outrun me, but you can't outrun my gun

After Body damage, our second most favorite skill to upgrade is Bullet speed. Firing a ton of super fast bullets is sure to confuse your opponents and it will do great at the beginning when you need to quickly reach high levels. Combine this with bullet penetration and an upgrade to the Machine Gun class of a tank, and we've seen a lot of success with that combination.

Overall, Diep.io is a very addictive game that has slower development process than Slither.io, but is also a lot of fun. Having various ways to upgrade your tank and different skills to develop makes you add some thought into the development of the game. At the end of the day, the gameplay in Diep.io is just so intense. The constant mouse clicking / tapping is a constant soundtrack to the quick and dynamic gameplay. If you are tired of eating other snakes, Diep.io is definitely that new thing that will provide variety in a similar game genre. We'll be waiting for you on the arena!

Download Tank.io for iPhone and iPad (App Store link)

or play it in your browser at Diep.io