Old school in every sense of the word... literally. Confused by that statement? Read more inside.
The game itself is based on a simple and highly cliched premise. We contact extraterrestrials in the near future, they become hostile, we deploy the Earth Defense Force (referred to as EDF from here on in). This sounds like a really bad B movie (actually Entertainment Weekly would call it a C movie) and Ebert and Roeper would give it two thumbs down for production value, but like 4 alien tentacles up for fun. After a really cheap short introduction that is essentially copied and pasted from the direction manual, you are put in charge of a generic EDF member and start by looking up at a huge spherical metallic spaceship with red and orange flashing panels, seriously. Imagine Star Trek, but in high def, and shinier with big flashing lights and glowing panels that seem to serve no function. That is the appearance of the alien ships. Anyways, there is tons of frequent banter and radio chat for new objectives and your EDF comrades shouting various one liners, often in an overwhelming cacophony. As you look down you finally have control of the game, which basically involves using the two analogue sticks to move and then aim. The R trigger shoots your gun and the right shoulder button changes between your two weapons you can select from a whole immense cache of weapons between stages. The left trigger jumps and dives depending on what way you are moving. Don't worry, except for a few weapons your ammo is infinite and you reload automatically. Certain weapons reload slower or have more ammo, and as you complete more levels and fight on harder settings, you can pick up boosts to your stats such as life and new weaponry which is saved.
Yes, that is literally the extent of the game, very simple arcade style controls, but don't get me wrong, the game is fun. Unfortunately there is no tutorial on how to play, you just pick up and go, but what I said explains the game clearly enough.
Ok, so after that mental time out and realizing the Earth is under attack, you rush forward with your team, and lo and behold, people come running from you guessed it... Giant Black ants straight out of a 50s movie. The animation and models of your character and other civilians are of PS2 caliber, as are your weapon pickups and items (in fact the closer you get, the more blurry and pixelated they become, in arcade style). Anyways, the ants are mostly black and reflective, and dwarf your team, however somehow the developers got the idea how to make it look like you were put into the shot afterward and that the scenes don't mesh, like a cheap movie. And when the ants climb over buildings like a giant play ground, you really do get a sense of scale and an ominous infestation.
Black ants are easy to kill until they start spitting acid on you, especially from above. One of my favorite aspects of this game is that almost everything is destructible, from the most massive skyscraper to the smalles fence (which doesn't actually decompose, but just knocks down). This is handy to make clear shots and get the enemies down from high up. Also it's just fun to blow crap up.
The objective of each round is only cryptically given in each set of briefings or radio transmissions, however, it generally boils down to either wipe out all forces, or take down the mother ship so it stops dropping off troops or just survive for x amount of minutes. As you go on further, enemies become more difficult and advanced, such as giant robots, assault spider troops, flying ships and a huge Halo type Scarab transport fortress. As this goes on, you should pick up more weapons from killing enemies and grabbing more armor boosts. However, the game isn't much more complicated than that. It's old school fun and basically is like one of those arcade games you would sink 5 bucks of quarters into each time you went. Granted there are some problems with walking through falling buildings and taking no damage, or a giant mother ship crashing on you, or just completely phasing through car, but besides a few seemingly non solid objects, there are no problems with clipping and targeting, that's spot on.
Also, the enemies bleed in low res, and in buckets... or rather swimming pool quantities, but that just adds to the cheesiness of the game, part of its charm. Don't expect lots of high res debris, rather just lots of jaggy and linear debris with not very complex polygonal shapes. Don't expect to shatter windows, but do expect to see glass particles come flying out of said shot windows.
Inexplicably, explosions also stay around for quite a long time and you can walk through the fire with no damage, and portable missle launchers travel REALLY slow when shot, but they pack a wallop. However the city is expansive and looks reasonably nice for a generic city with no distinguishing landmarks, also some of the textures are really nice, in contrast to a lot of other fudged graphical features. Also, the robotic enemies are more believable and more polished literally, and figuratively in terms of graphics. Also, it feels like a more worthy challenge to fight these enemies, like a real invasion force, like in War of the Worlds.
In later levels, vehicles come into play and pack quite a punch, but unfortunately they are rather slow and you can't pick up weapons and bonuses in them, nor can they be repaired and are easily overwhelmed due to their large size. Also the difficulty on easy is too easy, normal is pretty good, and hard is about where the game should be in terms of what it would be like in reality of the Earth was under attack from giant insects and robots. The fun thing though is multi-player mode, which is right out of the box. This reminds me of going to the arcade with my brother and friends and slapping in some quarters and just shooting up any badguy that comes along. It is fun in the nostalgic old school arcade sense, don't look for anything new and innovative here, you won't find it. In the end, there are 5 different settings, and you have you have to pleay each setting, playing at a higher difficulty setting won't earn you the achievement for the lower levels, however I recommend going from lower to higher in order to scale your powers and weapons accordingly. Overall, the game does a great job making you feel overwhelmed and under heavy fire (the screen shake and rumble REALLY does the job). It felt like you were fighting for your life, with comrades screaming and dying all around you. Oddly the graphics were PS2 level, but with more graphical features than in GRAW such as destructible environments and actual civilians that are visible. The sound and story in the game were pretty lame, but every transmission and news clip is right out of a cheap sci fi horror movie.
So in the end, if this game was more polished in the presentation department and the vehicles were more fun to play with like in Halo, this game would easily be in the high 8s, it's really the graphics and the sound and overall carelessness in the presentation (intentional to some degree, but unintentional to some degree as well) that hurt the game's overall score. In the end though, what matters the most is that this game is very fun and very old school and 39.99$ brand new, so it's a value too, and with coop out of the box, you can't go wrong.