
Colorblindness makes all tanks appear the same color on the radar, preventing you from distinguishing teammates from opponents. You can't see anything and have to rely on your radar to tell you what's nearby (and if an opponent has a stealth power, you're in trouble.) Blindness completely blanks your view. Interface Screw: Many of the bad superflags do this. Hostage Spirit-Link: More of a Team Spirit Link, but if you shoot a teammate, you will hear a donkey bray and immediately explode. God help you if your opponent has one and has also managed to get on top of a building they'll happily rain homing missiles down on you while you can do nothing to hit them. Homing Projectile: The Guided Missile superflag gives you these. Hitscan: The Laser weapon can kill instantly, but takes a long time to recharge. Glass Cannon: Every tank is capable of destroying any opponent in a single hit, but also only able to withstand one hit itself. Energy Ball: Tank shots have the appearance of a glowing ball of energy. The radar will still show your true color however, and firing your cannon will give you away (as tank shots are color-coded). Dressing as the Enemy: The Masquerade power gives your tank the team color of the opposing team. The only way to make a diagonal attack is to have the Guided Missile power (which will allow shots to lock on to things that aren't in the same horizontal plane) or use the Ricochet power to bounce a shot off an angled surface (which is extremely unlikely to hit anyone). Tanks cannot fire in any direction other than dead ahead, and cannot look up or down. Denial of Diagonal Attack: Deliberately invoked. The 3D graphics are deliberately simple, which is part of its charm the main focus is on the gameplay and providing a fun, balanced tank battle for up to dozens of players at once. The first version of BZFlag was released in 1992, and accumulated a fanbase as more and more features were added over the years.
The battlefield is generally very large, and just like in real tank warfare, battles can take place over very long distances.
The player is also equipped with a radar map, to tell them the positions of other tanks - this is often vital, as the tank's view will often be obstructed by tall obstacles. There is also an option to enable 'bad' superflags, which do something bad to tanks which pick them up. All superflags look identical, so there is no way of knowing which power you will get until you have picked it up (unless you've already picked up the superflag which gives you the Identify power). To add variety to the gameplay, the game also randomly places power-up flags called "superflags", which can give your tank a power to mess with your opponents. Any single hit on your tank will destroy it. (If you're lucky, the server might allow you to fire more than one shot at a time). Your one and only weapon is a fixed cannon that fires a large projectile in the direction you are facing, and takes a long time to reload. Players are spawned into a large battlefield in the control of a simplistic tank - essentially a slow, mobile box which can turn, move forward, and move backward (no strafing). BZFlag, short for "Battle Zone Capture the Flag", is a multiplayer tank combat game, inspired by Atari's classic 1980 arcade game Battlezone (1980).