Thank you Brutalsoft for sending is this game to review!

Invasion begins with your character, an FUF soldier, enjoying a peaceful night in the mountains. Their respite is quickly interrupted as a helicopter swoops down and escorts them to headquarters. Aliens are invading and it’s up to you to save the world.

When you first launch Invasion, you’ll be asked for your call sign, skill level, difficulty, and game mode. There is a campaign and survival mode with a normal and hardcore difficulty level. As a female gamer I opted for the soldier difficulty since the previous two (boy and man) didn’t apply to me. This game is only controlled with keyboard and mouse. The WASD keys will move your tank while the left mouse button fires you light guns and the right mouse button fires the heavy guns. The space bar is used for initiating slow motion mode.

The levels are broken down into fourteen waves and there’s a progress bar on the lower right-hand side so you can see how far along you are. On the left-hand side of your screen are four gauges that you have to pay attention to: heat, slowmo, armor, and a nuclear symbol.

As you fire your weapons the heat gauge will rise and when your weapons overheat, they’ll stop firing. This means that you can’t spam the firing ability. When the armor depletes, you’ll fail the level. You may get some help from a CPU ally and it’s nice to know that they can die without failing the level. However, one advantage the AI has is the knowledge of which direction to shoot before the enemies appear on the screen!

The enemy ships come in different sizes, speeds, and flight patterns. Once defeated, they’ll often drop power-ups that can slightly refill your gauges. The slow motion ability is nice and comes in handy when you have multiple enemies on your screen. Pink power-ups charge up the nuclear strike and when the nuclear symbol is fully illuminated, an attack will commence shortly.

Upon completing a level, you’ll earn some credits which can be used to increase your max armor, speed, heat, and cool down periods. You can also upgrade your guns which have stats you need to pay attention to like damage per second, heat per second, and cool down per second.

Like many Steam titles, this game supports cloud saves and has nineteen achievements to unlock. One of the achievements is called Butthead and shows a cartoon rear end. Other things to note include your character flipping off the aliens and some language (d*mn, b*stard). Spaceship violence is a given.

The combat graphics are simple, but get the job done. The story sequences are done in a comic art style. For a game less than 100MB, I’m rather impressed. I must say that my high-end gaming machine (Ryzen 5950X, 32GB RAM, SSD, 3080 Graphics) stuttered multiple times while playing this game so I think it can use some optimizing.

All of the communication is done via text dialogue. The rocking background music is quite good and is available for purchase on Steam for $1.99.

With a $2.99 price tag, this game is certainly worth looking into. Especially with a Steam sale. The game stuttering is a bit of a bummer, but I still enjoyed my time shooting down alien space ships.