Reptilian Rising is an enjoyably naff toy-based tactics game featuring Spartacus, St George and Einstein

rockpapershotgun.com:

The next advance in video game graphics technology is not ray-tracing or tray-racing or any variation thereof - it's janky stop motion and rubbish plastic dolls, and it actually began about 30 years ago, when I watched the Adam and Joe show for the first time. If you never watched the Adam and Joe show, they used to do home movie recreations of famous films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan using stuffed animals and action figures. I found these "Toymovies" hysterical as a kid - I suspect they are less so now. Probably, they are full of jokes we might tentatively class as "of their time". The point is, Reptilian Rising is sort of Toymovie: The Game.

Created by Gregarious Games and Robot Circus, it puts you in charge of squads of wonky plastic miniatures fighting evil reptilians on cardboard table-top dioramas. The characters range from Cleopatra through (three versions of) Churchill to off-brand riffs on Back To The Future's Marty McFly. The devs have just released a new trailer, following which I gave the Steam demo a whirl, and while I have a few reservations, I could see myself enjoying this.

The reservations mostly concern the humour. This is one of those retro parodies that falls over itself to pile reference atop allusion atop in-joke. It's charming when it comes to the recreation of a tabletop wargame - the levels look exactly like the ones I knocked together for my dysfunctional High Elf army as a budding Warhammer player, and there's a nice, fat cassette player on one map with buttons you can press to stop the music. But the overegged dialogue voice-acting is a little yeesh, especially given that there aren't many lines per character. I get it, St George - you're a braying blue-blooded spoof. Please put that line about ye olde butt-kicking on cooldown.

I was tempted to stop playing, after a few moments of St Georgian patter. But sunk cost thinking prevailed - and it proved to be no fallacy at all, for I started having fun. Beneath the whimsy, Reptilian