The Wii U version sold 40,243 units in Japan, and is one of the top 50 best-selling games for the platform in the country. However, it received largely negative reviews, holding a 45/100 on review aggregator Metacritic. Critics focused primarily on the game's limited amount of gamemodes and content. GameSpots Britton Pelee described it as being "hours of boredom spent playing a game that was never intended to be stretched out for so long." Both Casey Lynch of IGN and Kevin Knezevic of GamesRadar+ disliked the repetition of missions found in the story mode, with Knezevic claiming that the co-operative play only barely alleviated this. Patrick Barnett of Nintendo World Report disliked the story campaign in general for its lack of replay value and variety, as did Pelee. The controls were also a source of criticism; Barnett felt they made the game unnecessarily difficult because of the way they were designed. Most publications agreed that Tank! Tank! Tank! was a shallow port of an arcade game that was simply too low on content to justify a console release.
