Drone Tactics review

There's strategy aplenty. Each bug can carry melee and long-range weapons. When you're under attack, you can choose to counter-attack, straight up defend, or attempt to evade the incoming blow. If the going gets tough, you can load damaged robots into your base and bring them out fully repaired during the next turn. At any step along the way, you can also play re-usable battle cards that can bolster your actions, hurt nearby enemies, or repair some of your damage.

Another high point is the high level of customization the game allows. You choose the paint jobs and decorative emblems. You choose the bugs that go into each battle. You decide the weapons and armor that each bug carries into battle. You even get to put together your own deck of preferred battle cards. The further you go in the story mode, the more your insect army starts to feel uniquely "yours."

So what's not to like? You'll wish you could skip the tutorial battles that make up the first few chapters. You also probably won't like being forced to play through the optional-but-not-really-optional badlands missions a dozen times each just so you can gain experience and level up your bugs to keep pace with the boosts the CPU gets from one chapter to the next. A level editor or an online battle option would've been nice, too, although the 2-player wireless VS mode offers plenty of maps for those that can take advantage of it.

To put those complaints into perspective, it'll take you 40-plus hours to finish the story mode. Longer if you try to complete all of the optional badlands missions. That's 40-plus hours worth of awesome battles and addictive customizing.

May 19, 2008