Donald VS Martians

My first instinct when I loaded Donald VS Martians was to check whether I had the right game. The title screen has the confident energy of a dare, and the game itself follows through on that dare in the most chaotic way possible. This is a first-person arcade shooter from the You are Fired! team, released in 2019, built almost entirely around a political-meme premise and a handful of deliberately outrageous weapons. It has no ambitions beyond that, and whether that's a problem depends entirely on why you clicked install. The weapons are the defining feature here, and they're worth naming plainly: a detached blonde head used as a projectile, a double hamburger, and the hand of a metal man. Enemy types lean into the same unhinged energy, sending turtle-pumpkin hybrids and a character billed as a famous Russian stylist after the player. The game even has a kefir-drinking mechanic tied to health recovery. None of this is accidental. The developers are doing a bit, and the bit is consistent from start to finish, which is something I can at least respect. Consistency in absurdism is harder than it looks. The soul of the game, such as it is, owes a debt to the bottom-shelf Eastern European meme-game tradition, the same lineage that produced things like Stalin vs. Martians a decade earlier. That comparison is not entirely flattering. The Steam community discussions are brief and telling: threads asking for controller fixes and autosave options, with one simply titled "What the hell is this" surviving as a kind of monument to first impressions. The sole user review on Metacritic called it "almost horrible," which I'd argue understates the craft of its own absurdity while accurately summarizing the conventional play quality. The shooting feels shallow, there's no save system to speak of, and the Kanye-referencing soundtrack exists somewhere between ironic and genuinely unlistenable depending on your mood. Who actually wants to play this? Meme game collectors. People who find genuine entertainment value in the sub-dollar corner of Steam, where sincerity and chaos sometimes meet. Someone who wants a 20-minute burst of something aggressively weird during a lunch break. This is not a game for anyone hoping for tight gunplay, considered level design, or any kind of narrative closure. The game opens chaotically and it ends the same way, with guts and violence and no real arc in between. For the right person, that's the whole appeal. I hold space in my heart for small games that know exactly what they are, even when what they are is genuinely rough around every edge. Donald VS Martians knows what it is. It just doesn't execute it with enough technical care to earn a recommendation beyond the most niche curiosity purchase. The weapons are funny once. The enemies are funny once. After that, you're left with a first-person shooter that moves awkwardly and forgets you were playing it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Donald VS Martians.