Kill All Bugs!

All of those childhood years spent frying ants with a magnifying lens under the sun and exploding slugs with sprinkles of sea salt were not wasted. Kill All Bugs! finally puts that trivial insecticidal knowledge to good use against a rampage of giant bugs. Unfortunately, its gameplay is about as childish as those rudimentary extermination tactics.

With a variety of defences at your disposal, Kill All Bugs! tasks you with squashing waves of giant mutant bugs in an effort to stop them from destroying your cities. Insects crawl out of a central hive and you plunk down turrets to take them out before they reach your population centers.

Each map is organised over a grid, a tap of any open square prompting a build menu from which you can buy defences. Cash allowances doled out at the start of each mission, as well as collected from each defeated arthropod, can be spent on armaments ranging from gun turrets to laser fences to generators that boost range and attack power.

You also gain aerial support in the form of bomb sweeps by filling a gauge at the top of the screen with enemy kills.

Since bugs aren't restricted to a set path, estimating the exact route that the insects will take is more than just a tactical challenge. Figuring out the best location for your defences is important to maximise kills, but it's also critical to preventing them from being destroyed. Any defences blocking the bugs' course are instantly obliterated.

Not only is it completely unfair that your defences are eliminated in one quick moment, but you don't have a means of knowing precisely what's sanctioned territory. Even when you think you've discerned safe ground, the bugs can randomly decide to plough through a line of turrets and leave you without defences.

It's completely unfair and destroys the balance of the game. Even worse, most maps only have limited space for building defences, leaving you to trial-and-error in constructing defences instead of strategy.

Through the course of the game's 21 mission campaign, new bugs creep out at an alarming rate unevenly matched by the variety of available defences. New weapons are awarded too infrequently to keep things interesting. Additionally, the surprising inability to upgrade existing towers maintains a cursory level of depth to play.

Some ideas are interesting, though, such as laser fences that are intended to corral bugs down a certain path. Calling in bomb raids also introduces a nice layer of strategy on top of situating towers on the map. There are even multiple upgrades to your aerial support that become available as you complete missions.

The game goes all-in with a B-rated horror flick style (think Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!), yet doesn't capture the same satire or whimsy because of its faltering gameplay. Only the animated cut-scenes deliver any amusing style, while the rest of the game looks as segmented as creepy crawlers that scuttle about the screen.

Kill All Bugs! needs fumigation to rid itself of gameplay pests. The game's balancing has to be reworked to address the problem with bug rampages on defences before it can even begin to compete with others in the genre. Just like the hapless ants of our childhoods, this game is fried.