This arcade shooter is one that probably flew under a lot of people’s radar but definitely deserves a look at. Set in the not too distant future it is the job of you and your teammates to defend Earth from giant insects and alien ships. At your disposal is over 300 different weapons and vehicles to take on thousands of swarming enemies in a fully destroyable city. There are four different classes to choose from, two more than the previous game in the series and three campaigns with five missions each. Campaign mode allows up to four players and Survival mode allows up to six. Split screen local play and multiple difficulty levels including “Inferno” combine with the class and weapon choices to make the game replayable over and over. At a value price of $39.99 and with a release date of July 5th you can be defending New Detroit in no time.
E3 Hands-on Impressions:
This game got addictive fast. I was playing Co-Op with one other person on the XBLA version, I was “Tactical” and he was “Battle” with AI filling out the other two positions as “Jetpack” and “Trooper.” “Tactical” was the more “new to the series” class and it showed as I started racking up a massive score and destroying everything in sight. The specialty of my class was the ability to drop turrets to aid me and homing missiles. One of the aspects I really liked was how much you relied on your teammates. If you died a teammate could come over and revive you and if any teammate hit a health cube then the whole team benefited from it. They learned early in development that players would fight over who hit the health cubes so they just made it so that it helped everyone. With each teammate having a specialty staying together and covering each other not only increased survivability it also allowed for quicker revivals. My teammate found and jumped into a mech which did beautiful damage and helped tear through the level and demonstrated some nice and easy to learn vehicle play.
The graphics looked nice, modeling was excellent and there were no issues with graphic quality or breaking even when getting heavily swarmed by giant ants or laser blasts from above. The graphics aren’t groundbreaking but they are really nicely detailed and it is always fun to have a destroyable environment. The enemies were fairly diverse, though I took a certain extra pleasure from taking out the giant ants since they reminded me of the old school monster movies when you would see giant insects fighting the Army. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the game and testing out the mech and running through all the different weapons available and finding the strengths and weaknesses of each class more.
Last Call:
This game is a fun addictive arcade shooter that you can play with your friends or alone and still have a really good time. The price is right and the game play is clean and solid and includes multiplayer. I’m looking forward to this game coming out and getting a chance to run the whole game through the paces. And I want to blow up more giant ants.
