I turned a human-hating mecha-hamster into the ultimate weapon of mass destruction who loves a pre-annihilation scritch

We all loved Vampire Survivors, sure. But you know what that game was missing? An adorable little Tamagotchi fella who you could feed and fuss over ahead of every level, before grabbing it like the fat little rodent it is and unleashing it as a weapon of mass destruction.

Mochi-O's demo is criminally short—clocking in at just 20 minutes and two levels—but I didn't need much time to fall in love with this weird little game's titular human-hating mecha-hamster. How do I know this lil' guy hates humans? Well, for starters, Mochi-O straight up kills its last owner-slash-wielder-slash-commander.

If that wasn't enough confirmation, I got my hands on a rather rudimentary translation device which, when asked "what do you hate?" the screen flashed Mochi-O's response: HUMANS HUMANS HUMANS HUMANS HUMANS HUMANS. That's probably a solid enough testimony right there.

My job, then, is to not only refine Mochi-O into a weapon of war with upgrades and powerups galore, but to care for it and establish a solid bond through feeding it seeds and giving it plenty of pre-battle scritches. So that, y'know, it doesn't kill me too. It's an odd juxtaposition but a surprisingly endearing one—sure, let me give this extremely deadly weapon a few loving pets behind the ears before we hit the battlefield.

Once we are out on the front line—with Mochi-O controlled by holding him, of course—it's all about keeping enemy forces away from the defense line as they slowly scroll from right to left. Defeated foes drop seeds that I can suck up and grab new weapons, power up establishing ones, or round out Mochi-O into a faster, stronger, more suction-y robot rodent.

The actual bones of the gameplay is pretty typical Survivor-y stuff, but I really dug how I found myself prioritising which enemies to shoot on the fly. It's not always about aiming for whoever's closest to breaching my defenses—sometimes shooting one enemy can help me fell a bunch of others, like drones flying atop giant metal beams which, when defeated, drop the thing down onto whichever poor soldiers trudge along below.

The demo levels are so short I wasn't able to fully dig deep into the build mix-and-match potential, so my main fear right now is that the full game might be a little limiting in that regard. But I did have a bunch of fun freezing enemies before blasting them with a giant fullscreen horizontal beam, so maybe I won't particularly care too much about weapon diversity. After all, I only need hamster. Hamster is justice.

The good news is that the full game is out on Steam right now, and it's delightfully cheap at less than $5/£5, with a launch offer bringing it down to $3.99/£3.43. A few hours of weird, adorable, destructive fun for less than a cup of coffee? I can get behind that.