Polar Panic, at first blush, seems an awful lot like Pengo.  Then it seems an awful lot like Sokoban.  The game has 50 puzzle levels, 50 story levels and five survival stages that can be played by up to four players (local multiplayer only, sadly).

I found the cartoon art for the menus and help screens a little more compelling than the 3D in-game stuff, but it isn’t too hard to tell stuff apart.  The game involves pushing around various kinds of blocks and using them to smush bad guys and solve puzzles.  It plays from an overhead perspective, but at a bit of an angle, which tends to make it hard to judge distances on the upper parts of the levels.  I’ve died or failed a number of times because I couldn’t tell how far away things were.  An example of a time when a simple, 2D approach would have probably served the goals of the game better.

Polar Panic is still a good deal of fun.  The controls aren’t quite as sharp as I’d like, but they’re simple enough.  The game packs in a good amount of content with three difficulty levels for most of it, leaderboards and letter grades based on time, combos and efficiency.  Someone who gets bit by the Polar bug will get good value for their 800 MSP.  However, there is no level editor, which seems like an oversight.

Fans of Pengo and other associated knock-offs might want to give the trial a download.  The holiday season might be too crowded with other high-profile titles for Polar Panic to get much notice, but it’s a good entry for the action-puzzler crowd.

0 day Attack on Earth is a GULTI title, brought to us by Square Enix.  GULTI was responsible for the Raiden Fighters Aces port as well as whatever on earth this is.  But hey, I’m a big fan of shooters, so what’re they bringing us this time?  0 day is a 3D, dual-stick shooter.  We fight off enemies that are invading various cities while collecting fighter upgrades and gaining ranks.  Sounds a lot like the Dreamcast game Armada, which I was a huge fan of.

Sadly, someone somewhere seems to have missed a memo.  The game doesn’t look all that great, the framerate is super raw, and everything just feels really weak.  It’s not unplayable, but more of a did-I-pay-1200-MSP-for-this bad.

I played the single player game.  It starts in New York, on day 1 of some sort of alien invasion.  Play involves choosing a ship (out of four) and flying around a big open space with my AI buddies, looking for orange blips on my radar to blow up.  I killed all of them and moved onto day 2, where I got to do the exact same thing, for six more days, until day 7.  Day 7 came with a boss fight that wasn’t fantastic, but was at least something different.  After the boss, the game moved me to Tokyo, day 1.  I saved and quit.

The game throws a lot of stuff at you and feels really cheap.  Enemies are sometimes hard to see and come from bad angles, while the screen rotates painfully slow, to the point of being useless.  The main boss monsters (at least in New York) for each day have tentacle attacks that would kill me in two hits.  I died a lot, but the game just let me continue and keep playing that day.  Fighting the same enemies for six days feels really artificial, like the developers didn’t have enough content to give the game sufficient length, so just repeated what they had until the duration of the game felt reasonable.

There’s no local multiplayer, but there is online support, both for co-op and two competitive modes: Capture the flag and control point.  It might be more fun to play with friends, as some strategy and organization might alleviate some of the cheap deaths I suffered.  The main menu offers a Customize option that seems to indicate 36 other unlockable ships being in the game but provides no clue as to how those are actually unlocked.  Maybe they’re ranked-based?

As rough as the game is, it’s a bit of dumb fun.  Not as dumb nor as fun as Earth Defense Force 2017, but what can you do.  I’d say 1200 MSP is way too much to be asking for this.

Normally I don’t bother with DLC stuff, but the Trials HD Big Pack hit today (400 MSP), and it absolutely rocks.  For anyone who’s a fan of the base game, this is more or less a no-brainer:  12 medium levels, nine hard levels, two extreme levels, five new tournaments, a new skill game in each category and a handful of new achievements.  On top of that, the in-game editor’s got a bunch of new objects, including support for new physical elements.