This game was originally covered as part of our Nindie Round Up series that sought to give coverage to a wider breadth of Switch eShop games beyond our standard reviews. In an effort to make our impressions easier to find, we're presenting the original text below in our mini-review format.

Mech Rage is meat-headed and silly and it knows it, earning it brownie points.

It’s an endearing and carefree twin-stick shoot 'em up with a stock, generic plot and some fairly good combat. You take control of a mech suit and are left to clear each room of alien invaders before progressing to the next room to rinse and repeat. It’s about as by-the-numbers as you can get, but the B-movie-style dialogue, overly macho directions on the menus, and stereotypical characters make it an enjoyably irreverent experience.

The gameplay is equally off-the-shelf, but is serviceable. As you’d expect, you’re armed with a basic infinite rapid-fire weapon and have access to various upgrades to a secondary weapon as well as other items, dashes, and the like. You’ll traverse a selection of stages on each floor and upgrade your gear between levels using your collected points. As you’d expect, it’s up to you to prioritise what kind of gear you’ll improve based on your preferences and current needs, giving it some variation and replay value.

The gameplay itself is a little slow for a shoot 'em up and feels just a tiny bit shallow; the control isn’t the smoothest of the genre and it all feels just a bit clunky. That said, it’s serviceable — there's that word again, but it fits so well — and can lead to some fun experimentation, particularly on the easy difficulty, which the game humorously scolds you for selecting.

Aesthetically, it’s fine but nothing special. The visuals are a good example of this, with character models all being classic stereotypes and the main support, Alexa, acting as a clear parody while also resembling other tutorial characters like Cortana from the Halo series. The soundtrack is also a bit uninspired, with the generic sci-fi military vibe again supporting the atmosphere of the rest of the game.

To sum up, Mech Rage is a self-aware and amusing shoot 'em up that seems to relish parodying space marine tropes. It isn’t the best shmup out there — not by a long shot — but you might still find some fun with it.