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So stop me if you've heard this one before...

The scene is a remote little planet called HS-0204 where a number of spacefaring surveyors are on expedition to investigate signals apparently sent by a ship that disappeared a while back with a shipment of advanced nanomachine-modified artificial insectoid life aboard.

Early on, we find that apparently sending some science team surveyors was a bad idea, because this is clearly a job for a stoic space marine totally devoid of personality. Sorry, Chief, no Master here, not even a seasoned War veteran to grind his Gears...we're in the driver's seat of an unlucky surveyor named Levin Gatas instead.

Such is the setting of our rousing romp through a galactic backwater rock with an unmemorable numeric name and a serious infestation problem.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice...the storyline of this game is...really...uh... ... ...yeah. It's like a campy sci-fi B-movie, but I'm almost not sure that it's entirely intentional, but for whatever reason, I think it manages to work rather effectively. Budget title, budget plot...makes it seem a lot less incongruous than if you had either one seeming like it was meant to carry the comparatively "dead" weight of the other.

Do be sure to let me know if the game text is too hard to read at its new size on YouTube, because I have a feeling this game wasn't really designed to be played on such a small screen as the one you behind the keyboard are seeing within the browser window right this very moment.

(What's the point in having a QWERTY-style keyboard layout for name input...if the lettering is going to be completely alphabetical in order? That really threw me off for a bit.)

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Mission 1: Assault

So here we meet our unlucky, plucky, (allegedly) sucky hero...well, protagonist guy. His name is Levin Gatas, as we saw at the very beginning for the default player name, but it's never once used in-story as far as I know. Is it supposed to be "immersive" to have a player character who has your name, but otherwise has the potential to be completely unlike you in about every way possible? It just strikes me as kinda dissonant that you get free reign over his name, except that he's his own fixed character instead...so how am I, Ms. Mutou, supposed to feel about the kind of character I lend my own moniker to?

Then again, really, I'm not supposed to be concerned about that at all, really...because as I mentioned, the name is completely...well, almost completely meaningless to the single-player campaign mode. Its real function is the online leaderboards and multiplayer functions rather than anything else, which is why you can't change it after you've set it...but it's all a really amusing little tangent to start off on.

As for the particulars of gameplay, I was fortunate enough to encounter the lion's share of the tutorial pop-ups, which always show up on demand when they become relevant, so I don't actually have to explain the basics, and I can get more in-depth on the particulars later on. I also made a point to pull out and show off all four guns as well as the grenades and trusty beam whip. (Levin brought all this armament along for a simple scout and survey mission?!)

For now, just let the guilty pleasure of a shoot 'em up with an equally guilty pleasure of a second-rate storytelling tacked on wash over you. I'm not ashamed to admit that I enjoy every moment of this thing, because I paid ten dollars and got ten to fifteen dollars' worth of entertainment.

Oh, and in case you were worried, this is about the "talkiest" that the game gets. Well, that's not entirely true, but for all the rest of the talking mid-mission, you'll at least have full player control...which accounts for why this whole thing will be a good experience for me, too. Recording the game and watching it as a spectator will actually let me catch all the easy-to-miss text that automatically advances without my permission. That's really my "biggest" legitimate complaint on this whole game...

Oh, and get used to "That's why you're still a kid!"...because it's not going anywhere. I've heard that it's something of a minor viral meme among Onslaught players...but given the kind of minimal market penetration, it obviously won't be going mainstream any time soon.

...

"That's why you're still a kid!"

(Try it! It's infectious!)