It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve played a good ol’ straightforward first-person shooter. The last one I reviewed is certainly a distant memory: that honour goes to Mothergunship in 2019, which was forgettable then and definitely hasn’t improved with time. It’s strange too, because shooters in general are a genre I tend to enjoy; I spent uncountable hours playing various Halo games in single and multiplayer as a teenager, moved on to Warframe in university, and have more modern releases like Robocop: Rogue City and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun sitting in my Steam backlog. Maybe it’s just that recently I’ve been more invested in narrative-centric (see: the several visual novels I’ve covered in the last year) and cozy games (Mika and the Witch’s Mountain and Tiny Garden both jump to mind) over the traditionally “shoot first, ask questions later” experiences of many shooters. Then again, perhaps that expectation has been clouding my judgement all this time, because while Shooty Shooty Robot Invasion is thoroughly a game about shooting stuff (I think it’s illegal to put “shoot” in your title twice and not be), it surprised me with how much of a story it actually wanted to tell.