Get Off My Lawn is a free-to-play vertical lane shooter. Your role is to take control of a old age pensioner with a liking for guns whose home is being attacked by a UFO full of alien invaders. The objective is to kill aliens and collect the valuable orbs they drop in order to upgrade your weapons and buy boosters to keep you alive longer.
The action takes place in the back-yard of the house on a lawn measuring 7 lanes by 7 hexes deep. Gameplay consists of moving the character left and right across each lane while shooting the advancing aliens before they can reach and damage the house. Your armory consists of three guns: musket, shotgun and ray gun. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages; i.e. the ray gun shoots through all ranks of aliens in a lane but has a delayed firing time, while the shotgun shoots across three lanes but only at a shorter distance.
The action sees the aliens enter at the top of the screen and proceed downwards towards the house hoping to reach and damage it before being killed. There are twenty levels consisting of several waves of advancing aliens. Levels and waves increment as and when you kill all the aliens that appear in a given wave. The challenge of killing the aliens increases in difficulty with progress made, as the aliens appear faster, in larger numbers and with higher degrees of armour, to lower your weapons effectiveness. Furthermore there are four types of aliens: grunts, dodgers, large behemoths and tanks. A combination of these factors provides the central challenge to weapon selection and targetting priority. Master these and you will get further in the game.
With basic yet functional graphics and well suited accompanying audio the game relies on its fast and simplistic gameplay natureto draw you in. It will keep you playing because of the semi-pschological need to keep acquiring orbs to get deeper into the game. The more orbs collected the better weapons and more boosters that can be purchased. The better weapons and more boosters the more orbs you can acquire.
Weapons can be upgraded to six or more levels. As can the home defences (or health) to keep you in the game for longer. Boosters include three types: Slow-time to delay the aliens movement, Rage to increase player speed and Push-back to send the aliens back to the top of the screen when you are getting overwhelmed. You can also spend some orbs to continue once your house has been destroyed.
So far.... so appealling. Right!? Well its free-to-play but unless you are prepared to put in alot of hours... (possibly 50 or more) it will take a very, very long time to acquire the large amount of orbs needed to complete the game. (Some of the achievements require all upgrades to be made.)
So now you've guessed it! This is sadly... where the microtransactions come in. You can buy orbs from as little as 59p for 25,000 to a few million at the premium price of 13$/11£. I havent purchased a single orb but if you want to make any reasonable level of progress you will have to buy the Orb Doubler which speeds up the rate of orb acquisition to a decent rate. Once purchased it will be active for every game you play. While its only costs £1/$1.50 it is probably the only purchase you will likely make if you have any intention of 100% completing the game because one of the achievements also requires a purchase using the steam wallet.
Ordinarily I would not use micro-transations in a game full-stop but the Orb Doubler really makes this game worth playing. Im 90% sure that if you dont have it, progress with be so painfully slow that you will likely give up because the whole design of the games seems to be geered to you making at least one or more purchases. (W/o it I could collect around 2-3k orbs per game. With it I can collect 4-5k) So while I cant blame the developers for adapting this model (it is free after all), just bear all this in mind before choosing to put any effort into playing this at all.
That said I can only really recommend the game if you understand the way the game works and that you'll likely be making at least one purchase. Overall the game provides some brainless, casual fun if you dont mind playing and replaying many games over the next few weeks/months. Indeed it is designed for precisely that reason and even gives you the option of starting at levels: 1, 5, 10, 15 or 20 depending on the challenge you feel like facing. You will also get a blast from playing if you love(d) or hate(d) the teletubbies as the aliens appear like the characters from those shows. At least in part.
Get Off My Lawn is a decent game. Nothing great. Can be fun if you dont mind paying for the Orb Doubler (£1/$1.50ish) which on this occasion I didnt if it goes to support the developer in a small way.
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