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.
The dealbreaker: You can look in first person, but you can’t shoot in it.
This is the kind of thing that sounds like a minor detail until you’re trying to sneak past a guard. Snake, a legendary soldier pulled out of retirement to infiltrate a remote Alaskan nuclear weapons facility, can switch to a first-person view to scout. But when you need to aim, you’re back in the top-down camera, often at an angle that doesn’t show you the person you’re trying to shoot. This is a stealth game where the stealth mechanic is extremely unforgiving. The sequels get a bit better, fortunately. If you’re interested in giving the original a go, it’s playable in Master Collection Vol. 1 on PC, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X. Even though it’s unwieldy, at least it’s short: you can finish it in a handful of hours.
4
Dino Crisis (1999)
The dealbreaker: “DANGER!” prompts that take your controls away at the worst possible moment
Clearly, this is a recipe for disaster. The setup here is delightfully silly: You’ve got a secret research island, a missing scientist, and a government project that has gone very wrong. (Spoilers: There are dinosaurs involved.) Imagine Resident Evil, but with dinosaurs, and you’ll get the right idea. You play as Regina, a special ops agent on a mission to rescue a scientist named Dr. Kirk. Tragically for the doctor, you move with tank controls under a camera that follows you instead of staying fixed.
Capcom tried to mitigate this with a quick-turn button, but Dino Crisis takes your controls away exactly when you’d want them most. At scripted points of the game, that “DANGER!” prompt flashes on screen, during which surviving means button mashing, not steering. Everything you’ve carefully practiced, your turning, aiming, and running skills instantly become irrelevant, and if your reactions aren’t fast enough, you’re punished.
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3
Syphon Filter (1999)
The dealbreaker: Armored enemies, and a very slow manual aim
A shooter lives or dies depending on how fast you can land headshots. Syphon Filter is Sony’s stealth-and-shooting spy thriller, starring secret agent Gabe Logan. Gabe’s job is to stop a deadly virus, and the game wants you to play it like a fast-paced spy movie. If only that were possible! It’s not quite tank controls, but Syphon Filter is very unresponsive and awkward to play. You see this most when you try to shoot. The game does give you lock-on aiming, but that doesn’t help when your enemy is wearing body armor…so you need to switch to a slower first-person aim, anyway, to go for the head. So the skill the game cares about the most, landing a headshot on an armored guard, is the one it makes you do slowest. While enemies shoot you from off-screen. Have fun with that!
2
Parasite Eve 2 (1999)
The dealbreaker: A role-playing sequel that swapped turn-based battles for real-time shooting, with controls so stiff that learning them is the hardest boss
This is a strange reinvention for a series that started as a turn-based RPG. Aya Brea, a former NYPD officer, now works for an FBI unit that hunts creatures created by mutated cells. In the sequel, she fights in real time, with tank-style controls. You explore pre-rendered backgrounds, lock on to enemies, and dodge as you investigate a monster outbreak that starts in a Los Angeles shopping tower and leads to a deserted town in Nevada. The toughest part of Parasite Eve 2 isn’t a boss or a random encounter but mastering what one contemporary reviewer called “the stiff and stubborn playcontrol,” though it gets easier after an hour or two. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you still have to spend that hour or two developing that muscle memory.
1
Silent Hill (1999)
The dealbreaker: It’s very difficult to find on modern consoles, and the original code got lost
Now this is a different kind of unplayable. For the original Silent Hill, access to the actual game is your main enemy, not necessarily the odd controls or unforgiving gameplay. Here, you’re playing as a man searching a fog-covered town for his missing daughter. The 1999 game itself is out of reach on modern consoles: its publisher has acknowledged that the source code was lost, so for a very long time it couldn’t be officially ported or remastered. (A fan decompilation project just finished reconstructing the original code, which could open the door to unofficial ports someday.) Your options for playing this today are an original PS1 disc or, for now, the PS3 store.
If you want the series on a modern console in the meantime, there’s the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f from 2025, and Townfall. For now, the best way to play the first Silent Hill is a PlayStation, a disc, and a lot — a lot — of patience for dealing with fog.