In sum: This game left me immensely frustrated, and not just from the technical failures.

Anyone following indie game news circa 2009 can probably remember the promotional blitzkrieg that was Stalin vs. Martians. A crowdfunded project by three alleged studios, it promised the sort of over-the-top absurdity that had to be seen to be believed.

See for yourself.

Needless to say, a lot of people suspected the whole thing was a hoax, and the scheduled release for April 1st didn't help matters. The real April Fool's punchline was that the game was real—and was designed to be bad. From clunky unit selection to abysmal pathfinding to a braindead AI, despite the colourful 3D graphics (it is, if nothing else, visually decent) it plays like something out of the early 1990s, before developers knew how to work those bugs out of the interface. Stalin vs. Martians actively fights you trying to play it.

Described as "a perfect choice for anyone who just hates the strategy genre", this is true only insofar as (like so much of the game) you're being ironic and want to piss them off even more. It's not the arcade design, which might have actually worked had proper gameplay been a serious consideration: troops reinforce immediately through purchase, and defeated enemies (sometimes) drop power-ups that improve the performance of the entire unit type, letting you keep riding your momentum. The trouble is, these power-ups last only seconds, so if the Martians aren't killed in close quarters it can be hard to nab them in time—most critically Gold, which increments by +10 each and is required for new units and special abilities. Stats boosts cap at 150% and health pickups only affect a single unit, so optimizing your army is far harder than it seems.

As to strategy, there is very little you can do to optimize a plan of attack, in large part due to the virtually nonexistent AI. Martian foot-soldiers (which run faster than most tanks) rush you as soon as they see you, as do most other units, so it's very easy to get swarmed before you're organized. Fog of war means you can come under fire without even seeing the enemy—a particular nightmare with the bug artillery, which lob area-of-effect warheads and are usually guarded behind a large frontline force.

Despite what all this may suggest, the "human wave" is NOT a viable tactic: in every mission save the last, you are horrendously outnumbered and outgunned, so you can't afford excessive casualties. Fortunately, the AI's shortcomings work in your favour as Martians usually pursue the first unit they see until it dies, meaning you can bait enemies with a single scout tank and then destroy them in detail with the rest of your army. The one exception to this is the "Toy Story aliens", which typically stay in place and can match range of everything except the Katyushas in the later missions. The very second mission becomes an infuriating game of luck as these guys are scattered everywhere, and they all have to be killed to win.

(Mission 7 is also a nightmare as you're limited to infantry until you've killed the artillery, said artillery is extremely effective against soldiers, and despite costing 50 gold the invincibility buff wouldn't activate without more on-hand—you can lose the whole task force before it's even crossed the bridge.)

Stalin vs. Martians was abruptly pulled from Steam a little under three months after its release, though it can be found stubbornly persisting on various abandonware sites. A clue as to why lies in the credits sequence (if you manage to see the campaign all the way through): not only was its marketing a blitzkrieg, the passage on proprietary software, and the file structure of the game itself, strongly suggest the game is actually a stand-alone mod of Nival Interactive's Blitzkrieg 2, in which case they may have run into legal trouble behind the scenes. There were plans to create a "playable and enjoyable" parody FPS sequel, but likely having exhausted the Internet's patience, its Kickstarter campaign bombed miserably.

What makes this story tragic, and not just another Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, is that, as the Escapist review says, the devs clearly had fun putting this together. The intro video is the full three minutes of the Soviet anthem (although oddly it doesn't seem to be the original 1944 lyrics), the soundtrack is a bizarre oscillation between genre-dissonant Sinopop and Klepacki-esque hard rock, unit VOs are totally memetic, and everything from the mission briefings to the loading screens is saturated in absurdist humour. And unlike Red Alert 3, this was all made by actual Russians. Painful though it was to play, I still found myself smiling at points throughout the game. If only as much care had been put into the book as its cover...