The Great Vermin Extermination is a top-down Shmup with tank controls. That style of movement consists of facing your character in the direction you want to go and pressing forward. Imagine driving a car and how you can’t directly move left or right, only accelerate and reverse. It is a style of controlling your character that was mainly used for Survival Horror back in the day, with many people not being fond of it for more intense situations. The key thing to take away from this opening paragraph is that this title isn’t a twin-stick shooter. Precise and accurate movement is something you’ll have to learn, but when you do, there is nothing quite like clutching your little roomba into tight spaces as if this was a Vin Diesel film.
With that main gameplay factor out of the way, let’s back up a little and talk about our character Amamae. This young-looking girl has seemingly been hired to exterminate some pests and rolls up in her circular tank. That’s the extent of the story. Everything that occurs after is a desperate fight for survival with no more text or plot to be found. Our main decision beforehand is to either pick the Simple difficulty or Standard. You should definitely start with Simple and still expect to quickly get annihilated by a horde of insects. Part of this may be due to getting used to the controls, but the more likely reason is not fully understanding the mechanics unless you clicked on the dev’s store page link.
You see, we may be tempted to shoot nonstop as we have unlimited ammo and our projectiles make short work of most insects. That is a viable tactic for experienced Exterminators chasing a highscore, yet for the beginner is a death sentence. The more you kill and upset things, the greater push-back you can expect from the now riled insects. It is essentially kicking a bee’s nest, to use an apt metaphor. Our goal is not to kill the insects themselves but their nests which they spawn out of. Simple has seven nests in the arena, while the Standard difficulty has eleven. Another key difference is how high the push-back from your destruction can be. With Standard, you will unleash an absolute wave of enemies that is amazing for your score and less than amazing for your average player’s lifespan.
Surgically removing the eggs is all well and good, greatly helping a player to clear their chosen difficulty. There is only a single arena, so you can finish the game within five minutes, depending on one’s skill. Given how challenging this is, even without stirring up the insect brood, it is unlikely but definitely possible. What you won’t get by choosing this easier route is all of the hentai. Those are locked to clearing the arena with a highscore and receiving a good rating. You’ve technically won the game, yet have you really? It really incentivizes repeated playthroughs. Even if you can’t get the scores needed, you’ll still be making progress since the lewd content also unlocks after a certain number of kills. The top one requires 50,000 overall slain insects. It is not as difficult to achieve as you’d think.
One of my favorite things about this game is how the combat feels. Insects absolutely melt under your firepower. You can easily clear a path through a screen-filling wave of them and navigate through this deadly sea. The spread-out projectiles your vehicle shoots out are perfect for this type of situation. On that same note, while it may be called a tank and have the firepower to back that name up, it is pretty fragile. It won’t take much to be destroyed, especially if you are swarmed. There are a few invincibility frames, though it’s up to you to quickly think up how to get out of that situation. You can go from full health to dead in no time. An important thing to know is that the bigger the insect, the bigger the bite. This makes that slow yellow bug quite the danger as it can’t be taken down quickly and will destroy 85% of your health in a single hit.
Taking damage will reduce some of the overall aggro you’ve caused among the insect’s nest. If things are getting too hectic for you, it may not be a bad idea to purposely get hit by the smaller bugs. The more aggro you have equals a higher score multiplier, yet dying nets you nothing at all. As you slay the insects and their nests, they will drop black orbs. Collecting these will slightly fix up your tank and build up your special meter. Once that meter is complete, you can unleash a 360-degree attack that will destroy most anything around you. This includes a nest. It can be quite handy to zoom in there, let it off, and retreat to a safer location.
With how your projectiles have infinite range making it likely you’ll kill something off-screen, that special attack can be a double-edged sword if you use it while surrounded. You may have survived what was possibly a fatal situation, but now the horde is really disturbed. Honestly, this is nearly a horror game with the amount of “Oh god, no” moments you can experience. I suppose that may have been what they were going for with this control scheme and the intense darkness surrounding the arena. My poor little roomba didn’t stand a chance, thanks to how badly I controlled it at first. Heck, I’m still playing it and trying to get a higher rating. If you’re here solely for the lewd content, I’d walk away from the thought of purchasing this title. They really make you earn it.
There is controller support, yet it is what I’d call an unplayable way to control the game. You can not use the d-pad, and there is no dead zone on the analog stick. This means that the simple act of trying to go straight forward is a near-impossible task. If you’re off by even a bit, your roomba will slightly veer towards the direction your stick is closest to. That will either mean your roomba spins out or takes you to an unintended place, usually straight into the mouth of a giant insect. Limiting it to eight possible directions would have been far wiser than this overly sensitive 360-degree analog stick control. Or simply letting us use the d-pad. Unfortunately, if you are not used to or willing to play via a keyboard, this will be a game-breaking flaw. Your character handles just fine otherwise. Here’s hoping they eventually fix the gamepad’s issues in an update.
After having defeated the Standard difficulty, we will have unlocked several modifiers to play around with. One of these is an even more challenging difficulty and an option to die in one hit. I’ll say no thanks to that, I’m still trying to get that B rating, but the choice is there for those far more skilled than I. While on that main menu, you can also view your unlocked hentai CGs and change your character’s costume to a micro bikini. The latter is only reflected in the CG artwork. In-game, all we ever see is the tank. The Great Vermin Extermination was an extraordinary use of 84 Cents. It is good Arcade fun with far more than a mere Dollar’s worth of entertainment. I’d still suggest trying the demo first since many people dislike tank controls, though it definitely deserves the chance. The experience of being locked in a dark, desperate battle against a seemingly endless horde of insects is as exciting as it sounds. No matter how many times the swarm overwhelms you, it is difficult not to dust yourself off and go right back into this Great Vermin Extermination.
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