Bugs vs Tanks! (3DS)

 One of the less popular titles in Level-5's Guild series, far behind the likes of Crimson Shroud or Attack of the Friday Monsters, Bugs vs Tanks puts the player in the jackboots of a Nazi panzer battalion's leader. However, the battalion isn't (in this battle, at least) fighting against the allied forces, as the title suggests, bugs. Because they've been shrunken down really tiny by some unknown force. "Bugs" in this case covers a lot of zoological ground, too, as apparently all the minibeasts of the forest in which your roman-saluting protagonists find themselves instinctively know that fascists are the enemies of all life, and team up against you. You'll even fight a spider boss backed up by fly bodyguards at one point!

 

So, the actual game has you driving a tank around, fulfilling various missions: secure resources, rescue lost comrades, destroy ant hills to make things a little safer for yourselves, and so on. Every now and then, there'll be a defence mission, during which you just have to kill all of the bugs beseiging your base until they're all dead. Proressing through the game, new kinds of bugs get gradually introduced alongside new mission types, and if you go looking for them, you'll also find more shrunken tanks lying around waiting for you to comandeer them. The obvious comparision to make for this game thematically is to the Earth Defence Force series, and it turns out that structurally, Bugs vs Tanks has a lot in common with Simple Series games in general, too.

 

An interesting mechanical point is that by default, you don't have a fire button. Instead, as long as there's a shell loaded, you'll fire as soon as an enemy is in your line of fire. It works well enough that there's no reason to change to the manual firing control scheme, either. Instead, your focus is to be more on strategically placing yourself in such a way that you avoid damage in those few seconds between shells being fired, and as you progress through the game, also making  decisions as to whether it's worth fighting an enemy (or a swarm of enemies), as opposed to just trying to speed past it towards your goal as the clock ticks down.

 

It's a pretty fun game! The way it handles shooting is a little annoying at first, but once you get your head around what it's trying to do, Ithink you'll come to appreciate the game for what it is, rather than being chagrined about what it isn't. It's not really relevant in 2025, but Bugs vs Tanks actually also has streetpass features, and back in the olden days when that was a relevant thing, I actually did get a hit on it once, making it maybe the most obscure game I ever got one on.

 

This is the last time I'll mention this (unless I forget), but Nintendo themselves have ensured that if you want to play a download-only 3DS game that you don't already own, you have to pirate it. Taking that into account, Bugs vs Tanks is definitely interesting enough to be worth a look for free. But, as implied above, I did actually buy this on my original 3DS many years ago, and I definitely never felt ripped off through having done so. It's not as good as those more popular Guild games I listed at the start of the review, but those games are great, there's still plenty of room beneath them for Bugs vs Tanks to be considered a good game.