You might have heard about the first The Chikyuu Boueigun; it was a surprisingly fun and replayable third-person alien-killing-fest, for a title in D3's budget SIMPLE2000 series. 100 weapons, 3 vehicles, ridiculous swarms of enemies to destroy, and plenty of city blocks to level in the process, made for hours of fun.
Three years later, the developer, Sandlot, has come out with this sequel. I preordered the game at Seattle's Pink Godzilla shop, and the night it came in a friend and I played through the first 14 stages or so on Normal.
Like the first, there are five levels of difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, Hardest, and Inferno. If it's anything like the first game, the higher difficulties are truly insane until you get some of the more powerful weapons and you have collected many, many armor power-ups.
The first obvious difference is how much nicer the levels look. Night-time urban areas, residential zones with detailed renderings of Japanese homes, even historical London where you can blow up Big Ben as you shoot your Gorias at climbing ants. There's plenty of fancy effects to make the environments look realistic, and the framerate can get even crappier than in the original game. I think that's part of the charm, though.

So far we have seen one new type of enemy: in addition to the classic giant ants, flying saucers, walking tanks, and Godzillas, there are nasty giant jumping spiders. They shoot overwhelming amounts of web that can tangle you up. There are two characters to choose from, now: the generic EDF guy, who uses conventional weapons like from the first game, or a female EDF trooper who can fly around with a jetpack and use exciting new alien weapons. The female trooper has seemed rather more powerful than the guy, but perhaps that will change as we move into later levels and harder difficulties.
I'll post more as we get further into the game; the amount of fun we've had in just a few hours already justifies the 2000 yen cost. though.

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