Bugs vs Tanks! review for Nintendo 3DS

Platform: Nintendo 3DS
Publisher: Level 5
Developer: Comcept
Medium: Digital
Players: 1-4
Online: Co-op
ESRB: T

Hereโ€™s a phrase that probably doesnโ€™t pop up too often in reviews of download-only 3DS games: morally abhorrent. And yet that seems like the best way to describe Bugs vs Tanks.

I mean, itโ€™s not very often that you play a game in which the Nazis are the good guys. Yet thatโ€™s exactly what you have here. And Iโ€™m not talking Nazi analogues or Nazis from some crazy alternate dimension, or Nazi zombies, or anything like that. I mean that, in Bugs vs Tanks, you play as a Panzer-riding, genocide-doing, Hitler-loving Nazi straight from the 1940s.

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Admittedly, the whole โ€œgenocide and Hitlerโ€ thing isnโ€™t exactly stated outright. And, obviously, a game in which you and your squad mates have been shrunk down to the size of bugs isnโ€™t exactly going for historical verisimilitude. But at the same time, you โ€” playing as a German โ€“ are riding in tanks drawn from the historical record, and the gameโ€™s intro explicitly places the game in early 1940s, and you rage about the dirty Allied forces that did this to you. Thereโ€™s really only one way you can take that.

Donโ€™t get me wrong, I think itโ€™s perfectly possible to create works of art in which morally dubious characters are the protagonists: think Lolita, in either book or movie form. Heck, think modern day gaming heroes like Nathan Drake or Kratos, if you want something a little more relevant to this particular discussion. But at least those examples pause every so often to remind you that, whatever charm the protagonists may possess, theyโ€™re not exactly saints. In Bugs vs Tanks, by contrast, youโ€™re supposed to help the Germans on their way so that canโ€ฆwhat, get back to gassing Jews?

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You might think that Iโ€™m overreacting, that I should just look at Bugs vs Tanks as some silly little downloadable oddity, that I should put politics aside and just focus on the game play. I mean, inherent ideology aside, what youโ€™ve got here is essentially Earth Defense Force-lite, but shrunk down to its basic components so that it fits on the 3DS โ€” and God knows I love EDF.

But the fact of the matter is this: Bugs vs Tanks isnโ€™t good enough to make me do that. If it were a truly exceptional game, it might be possible to pull off the โ€œYouโ€™re playing as a Nazi!โ€ twist. But a couple of base defense missions and kill quests in which youโ€™re playing as wise-cracking Nazis, with no additional commentary beyond that? Sorry, but that just doesnโ€™t cut it.

Grade: D-
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