the game is a pretty fun little cross between pipe mania, scissors-paper-rock, and an action game. you’re sent on missions across these brief segments of overworld which link together a series of battles or other events, all in the name of completing your mission on the other side. you fight your opponents by throwing or dropping fragments of the right ammunition type into the tank, which turns it into pieces of ammunition (or garbage if you get the recipe wrong), which are then conveyed along a conveyor belt you build (and later have to maintain if it takes damage) to be fired at the enemy, at which point th enemy can shoot their own ammo to counter, and vice versa

it starts out fairly simply, with each battle being fairly difficult to lose, if anything, but quickly picks up some more mechanics (like conveyor repair and little enemies fired at you which need beating up to avoid them doing damage or slowing you down) and turns into a little more of a challenge

it could do with some minor quality of life tweaks, in my opinion, the biggest of which being showing your player characters before starting the round - you spawn in a seemingly random location, which means while you get to pause and observe the location of the pieces you need to build your conveyor, you can’t really decide where you’ll start moving until a few seconds in when you’ve identified which of them you are and where you are relative to your goals - this isn’t much of an issue, but it feels like completely unnecessary friction

the Switch version has some notable hitches in what were instant loading screens in the PC demo we'd previously played, but otherwise it plays just fine

I also get the sense that, while a good couch co-op game, the designs are built around being somewhat closer to the screen, with the colour-coded player indicators feeling very small from a few feet away, and the characters occasionally ending up easy to mistake for each other in the heat of battle

I really appreciate how much vocalisation of what you’re doing is needed, you have to co-operate on the colour-coded ammunition recipes, which are fairly easy to follow and displayed at the top, and you also have control of which of two lanes your shots are fired in, which you need to swap in order to counter the enemy’s own shots, so many a “hitting the switch” or “firing up” are enunciated on the couch

all that said I’m really enjoying the experience overall, having a lot of fun, and curious to see what further depth it may reveal as we play more!