I have brief but vivid memories of playing this at a friend’s house in my younger days, so I thought I’d revisit it after playing Tangled, by the same devs.

This is Planet Moon’s first game as a studio. The key members had previously worked at Shiny and contributed to MDK, and this game feels and plays very similarly. Superficially, it’s a third person shooter with a tongue in cheek tone. Its key gimmick is that there are three playable character types. The multiplayer mode is a focus but the solo campaign takes you through most of the different things you can do.

The Meccs (represented by Baz in the story mode) are Master Chief-esque space adventurers, but silly, with mockney accents. They have a variety of guns and bombs, etc. plus a jetpack and various techonological utilities. Delphi is a Sea Reaper witch who fights with sword, bows, and an overwhelming variety of magic spells. She has a vaguely European accent, an embarrassingly revealing outfit, and an awesome “turbo” leap to pounce across the landscape. Kabuto is a towering kaiju-like monster who lumbers around, stomping structures and picking up foes to throw or consume. He’s slow and clunky to use but the sheer size is a novelty.

On top of the three styles of play, the game has tons of ideas stuffed in. Too many ideas. The island maps are huge and open, fun to traverse and explore and each character has several options for approaching combat situations, not all of them as useful as others. Then suddenly there’s base building and mild strategy elements; you capture workers and food, command them to build, open up new structures, painstakingly place turrets in a manual, tedious process that’s poorly explained. In Delphi’s levels you find a jetski and then boom, there’s three separate boring race levels. There’s also squad tactic mechanics, with Mecc buddies or Kabuto’s offspring following you around, able to be commanded to attack.

In this stew of ideas many of them end up feeling half-baked, but the game still has a janky playground charm as you scoot around the wide 3D environments of this alien world, blasting creatures into bloody chunks. Less charming are the explicit attempts at humour in the cutscenes, which for the most part have dated badly. They occasionally raised a chuckle but much more often put me off. Kabuto’s chapter has no cutscenes and therefore no humour but he’s also the most laborious to control.

All in all it fulfilled my mild nostalgia, and despite being kind of a mess I have to admire its sheer chaotic inspiration. There may have been some cribbing from Halo which at the time was a similarly open third-person sci-fi shooter, but it’s so full of… stuff. Misguided perhaps, ambitious very much, fun? Sure, some of the time! Just be prepared to learn its alphabet of hotkeys!