Stalin vs. Martians Part 5: Black Gold

Let me start by saying I somehow managed to beat the objectives in Mission 5 out of order, which is actually kind of cool and also a little disappointing. But more on that later.

Mission 5 has Stalin sending you to destroy several UFOs which happen to be sucking up all the oil in Russia. Also, yes, after the previous mission you've been promoted to something along the lines of "High Orthodox Wizard Commander" or something like that. Anyway, similar to every mission up to this point, Tanks are your best friends and Stalin has come through by providing you with the next level of Soviet Tank, the T-34. Its exactly the same as the tanks before it except its much larger and they don't call themselves Bolsheviks on Bicycles (instead they quote some song I don't recognize...). Speaking of music, the battle music in this stage is some insane screaming metal. It actually fits really well and I have to admit, I was head banging a little while mowing over the Martians.

Speaking of the Martians, they've added to their forces as well. One new unit are these little green men that are slightly larger then the smaller Martians you've run into so far. So yes, I managed to target some of them. But, the strategy of running around with your tanks and letting their machine guns cut them down works even better. The next new unit are these large hopping mushrooms which explode when they get near your units. However, they don't seem to do much damage to tanks (in fact they might do no damage) so I sort of ignored them when they showed up in large masses.

When I went to kill the third UFO and last UFO that was sucking up Oil was when I accidentally beat the last objective of this mission. You see, the last objective is to destroy the main UFO, which looks like all the other UFOs except its green, buried in the ground, and guarded by tons of Martians. This just so happened to be between me and the third UFO I had to destroy to complete the first objective. So I of course mistook it for that other UFO and destroyed it before completing the first objective. When the game failed to tell me that I had accomplished that objective, I began to look around to see what was wrong. Finally, after running all over the map, I found the last UFO sucking up oil, destroyed it and won the mission.

That was sort of cool I have to admit. Honestly, it was kind of awesome beating an objective before it was given. It was sort of like when you break a game so it becomes a lot easier except in this case it just ended the level faster. On the other hand, it was disappointing because any good level designers would have isolated that last battle somehow so you couldn't accidentally stumble upon it before the right time. And, therefore, the ending of the mission was less then epic.

Part 6 will be up later this week. And I think I am getting close to the end of the game. Though we'll just have to wait and see.