1942, a year of death, depression, global war and alien invasion if Mezmer Games latest offering is to be believed.  A highly guarded secret campaign of WWII led by Stalin himself sees you having to drive the Martian invaders back from the motherland and save the Earth.

If that sounds, cliche, wacky and over the top then it’s because it is supposed to be, there really is nothing serious about this game.  From the Toy Story inspired look of some of the aliens to the pumping Russian techno music that accompanies every mission there is always something happening that will bring a cheeky grin to your face.

Dubbed a fast paced arcade-RTS, Stalin vs Martians is certainly lacking in some of those departments, namely strategy.  The 12 single player missions on offer here are easily completed within 6 hours and with no skirmish or online modes and not even the option to increase the difficulty there is very little here that will make you want to come back again and again.

In addition the AI is nowhere to be seen, enemies will often stand perfectly still until you reach a certain point where they will magically spring to life and attack with all their fury.  Whilst you can assign your troops into squads there seems very little need as pretty much every situation can be resolved with head on assault with your entire force, this can sap the fun out of the gameplay pretty quickly as each mission descends into the same thing, sure you get different objectives such as ‘defend the village’ or ‘liberate the town’ but they do little to inject any kind of challenge.

Unlike the majority of RTS games there is no resource gathering, base building or unit upgrading in SvsM, instead when you kill enemies they will drop coins that will either reward you with money or power ups that can heal, increase the defense, speed or attack power of a unit.  The money can then be used to buy reinforcements from the limited list of available troops and power-ups such as ‘rage’ that will make all your troops invincible for 30 seconds or the Russian national anthem which makes you cause double damage.  However collecting these can be very difficult at times thanks to the awful pathfinding skills of your troops, at times I had troops running off to the other side of the map for very little reason.

At the end of the day Stalin vs Martians is fun but still a bad game however you look at it, but somehow I can’t help but feel that it was intentional.  From taking orders from one of the worlds most renowned dictators, the repetitive retro feeling of the soundtrack along with the bad voice acting and the complete disposablity of your forces are almost a parody of the RTS genre in itself.  If you were to bullet point out the key factors that make an RTS game and produce something that does the bare minimum to reach those standards then SvsM is what you’d be left with.

Despite this being a budget title $15 still seems too much for the few hours of gameplay, and even less of entertainment, that SvsM will provide.  At a lower price point it would perhaps provide enough amusement to warrant a purchase, but until that happens I suggest steering well clear of this one.

3/10

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