A decent game overall. On the surface it has a lot of RTS elements but the game mostly feels and plays like a multidirectional shooter. There is a bit of early game strategy in terms of getting geared up before your opponents, but your AI buddies mostly just seem to run off and get themselves killed.
The sense of humour on display is extremely of-its-time. This game was very clearly developed in the UK in the lately 90s. As someone who grew up in that era, there is definitely a sense of nostalgia here and I found the silly story and various soundbites to be pretty entertaining. They definitely lean a bit too hard on a few stereotypes though.
I only played the singleplayer campaign, there was quite a bit of variety in mission types. Many variations on "annihilate all enemies", but also some escort style missions and a few boss battles. I found my success or failure in tougher missions often came down to how to enemy AI behaved early on - sometimes they would immediately swarm me before I had a chance to react, and others they would seemingly do nothing at all and wait for me to gear up and seek them out.
A few of the late-game challenges can get quite frustrating, and boiled down to trying them over and over until you find a tactic that works alongside a bit of RNG luck. What made this most annoying is the tedious process of failing a mission and beginning a new attempt. There is no restart option on failure, or within the pause menu of a mission. When you die it shows a screen of your enemies celebrating, boots you out to the level select where you have to dismiss a message telling you that you failed, then you reselect the level, click through the brief, wait for the level to load and finally it begins again. I understand long loading is a technical limitation of the hardware, but I'm sure the waiting could have been significantly reduced by having an immediate retry option. Some missions see you being wiped out in seconds by a huge boss, so your ratio of waiting to actually playing the game can be agonizing at times.
Still, on the whole I enjoyed playing through the game. Although I got stuck in a rut on a few missions, the objective always felt just achievable enough that I kept trying again and again until I finally make a breakthrough. The sense of improvement I felt as a player was tangible throughout and satisfying.
The sense of humour on display is extremely of-its-time. This game was very clearly developed in the UK in the lately 90s. As someone who grew up in that era, there is definitely a sense of nostalgia here and I found the silly story and various soundbites to be pretty entertaining. They definitely lean a bit too hard on a few stereotypes though.
I only played the singleplayer campaign, there was quite a bit of variety in mission types. Many variations on "annihilate all enemies", but also some escort style missions and a few boss battles. I found my success or failure in tougher missions often came down to how to enemy AI behaved early on - sometimes they would immediately swarm me before I had a chance to react, and others they would seemingly do nothing at all and wait for me to gear up and seek them out.
A few of the late-game challenges can get quite frustrating, and boiled down to trying them over and over until you find a tactic that works alongside a bit of RNG luck. What made this most annoying is the tedious process of failing a mission and beginning a new attempt. There is no restart option on failure, or within the pause menu of a mission. When you die it shows a screen of your enemies celebrating, boots you out to the level select where you have to dismiss a message telling you that you failed, then you reselect the level, click through the brief, wait for the level to load and finally it begins again. I understand long loading is a technical limitation of the hardware, but I'm sure the waiting could have been significantly reduced by having an immediate retry option. Some missions see you being wiped out in seconds by a huge boss, so your ratio of waiting to actually playing the game can be agonizing at times.
Still, on the whole I enjoyed playing through the game. Although I got stuck in a rut on a few missions, the objective always felt just achievable enough that I kept trying again and again until I finally make a breakthrough. The sense of improvement I felt as a player was tangible throughout and satisfying.