Disaster Year 2006: Earth Defence Force 2017

Earth Defence Force 2017 is a crack compulsive shooter from budget developer Sandlot. You take control of a slender, androgynous suicide soldier, the only chap (or chapette) with chops enough to halt an avalanche of rampaging space aliens. All pulp flavoured sci-war enemy archetypes are present and correct: insects, robots, hubcap craft, and stomping radiation beasts. All massive. All aggressive. Players get to trample the lot with a spiralling arms race facilitated by captured, flat, tech pick-ups. Weapons run the gamut from small, useless welding torches to sub-nuclear screen wipers. The higher the difficulty, the better the technology. Your hero is aided throughout by teams of endlessly enthusiastic CPU troopers that chant slogan and die at a brush. Cities crumble at the slightest barrage, nearly everything on-screen can be destroyed. Better still, you are never penalised for this destruction. As long as you make it, everything else is extraneous. There are no stealth interludes or enforced use of form lugging vehicles. If allies die, it's their hard cheese. Earth Defence Force 2017 is simply fifty plus levels of enemy blasting. As pure as Space Invaders.