Level 5 took me almost an hour, Jesus Christ, even on red speed with all tech upgrades maxed out it took a fleet half the screen to cut through the pong formation.
Shouldn't reactors generate power even if they're not connected to the city? The gameplay is good, but the story wasn't well thought out, too many glaring plot holes. Biggest one I noticed was when your instructor takes off in a shuttle to make sure his family is okay, isn't all of what's left of humanity in that city? Where would he be going that is under attack if the city is safe? Further more, humanity clearly has spacing fairing technology, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to colonize that many planets. If they can create anything they need using "nano technology" couldn't they just live in space?
I'm not even going to delve into all of the problem with being on the run from an alien goo that isn't that hard to drive back.
It would be nice if you could adjust how the towers prioritize targets. Dwarven Bombards should NEVER target the enemy unit that slips through the wall of troops, but they always do, and given their slow reload time that gives the ones that amassed in a single group a chance to overpower my troops which they wouldn't have had if the tower had focused on them. An arrow tower can take out the ants that make it through further down the path.
The actual races get exponentially easier the more you run the target courses because you rack up a ton of money and max out your car early on. You should have a "realistic" mode, where you can only run each course once. I'm sure it'd be a contender for impossible badge.
BTW I had no problems upgrading, beat the game in about an hour, make sure to upgrade your critter, at the start you should focus on batties and clusters, then once you've entered the second stage reset and switch to batties and vinecent. Focus on buying the final kicker, (the robot), once you've got the robot making runs into the final stage is easy. Finally divide you're upgrade points between batties, vinecent, make it bounce, and on fire, and max out your robot. Save you're smashes for the final stage, and canonball on the up bounce once you see the first batty, and be careful not to on the way down, slowing your decent will minimize your bounce back, you want a good high jump to meteor back down, but if you don't meteor you don't want to lose your momentum. AVOID CLUSTERS ONCE YOU'VE BEGUN UPGRADING ON FIRE, you cover way more ground repeat meteoring than they will help you cover, and they will kill your angular momentum.
When you're first starting out the bat clusters seem awesome, but after you've got some upgrades in they start to do more harm than good. On the other hand the big blobs are almost never an issue for me. It would be cool to have a cluster DECREASE option, you could make choosing one of the two bars instantly grey out the other, that way there wouldn't be any interaction between the two variables.
At first I thought the scared look on the kids face was amusing, but after an hour of trying to play this game, I find every one of it's quirks as annoying as this game. THAT'S RIGHT, THIS game will hence forth be what I compared really annoying things to. I hope you're happy.