Super Trench Attack!

I picked this one up expecting to write it off in twenty minutes and somehow surfaced two hours later with a grin on my face. Super Trench Attack! is a top-down, isometric twin-stick shooter wrapped in deliberate slapstick. Retro Army Limited built something that knows exactly how ridiculous it wants to be, and that self-awareness is most of what makes it work. The pixel art is chunky and expressive, enemy deaths are wildly over-animated, and the whole thing carries the low-fi energy of a one-person studio having a genuinely good time. For a sub-five-dollar game that fits inside an afternoon, there is a lot of personality stuffed into those pixels. The moment-to-moment gameplay is built around a surprisingly considered targeting system. You aim for heads for big damage, shoot out feet to slow shielded enemies, and lob grenades when things get chaotic. Your arsenal grows as you push through sixteen missions spread across four open areas, each with secret spots worth poking around in. A boot camp hub doubles as your base between sorties, housing four shops where you can pick up weapons, traps, health kits, and special items. There is light RPG progression underneath it all, with four stats to spend points into: pistol attack, rifle attack, grenade attack, and your health pool. It is not deep, but it is just deep enough to make you feel like you are building something. The camp even has a blackjack table if you want to spend downtime gambling your in-game earnings, which is exactly the kind of absurd sidebar this game earns. The structure runs across three acts, and to break up the standard mission loop, some boss encounters play out as on-rails shooting galleries. Players with low tolerance for that format may find the boss sections thin, and the humour leans hard into lowbrow territory that will not land for everyone. The comedy is unabashedly crass in places, and a few of the jokes have aged in ways the developer probably did not intend. The story is skeletal at best. If you come in wanting narrative, you will feel that absence. Repetition also creeps in during the back half; the enemy variety is limited and the mission structure does not change much between acts. What holds it together is the sound design and the general sense of craft underneath the goofiness. The exaggerated audio, tanks going up like they were packed with explosives, pistol fire that sounds like a machine gun runaway, gives the shooting a tactile comedy rhythm that keeps individual encounters lively. The soundtrack fits the mood in a way that surprised me; the camp theme in particular has a warmth that makes returning to base feel like a small reward rather than a loading screen. For a game this small, the audio work was clearly not an afterthought. At its length, four to eight hours depending on how thoroughly you comb for secrets and achievements, Super Trench Attack! is almost engineered to be a weekend-evening game rather than a commitment. The Steam community has rewarded it with a very positive rating across over a thousand reviews, which is a signal worth taking seriously for something this modest. If the humour connects with you in the first fifteen minutes, the rest of the game will too. If it does not, nothing that follows will change your mind.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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