From here, the tutorial's lessons progress quickly. Any of the slowly tumbling asteroids can be towed toward your bases by holding the R2 button, allowing your defenses to pulverize the rocks and net you some much-needed bits of health, some cash for upgrades (more on that in a second) and a little + symbol that increases your ship's draw to allow you to scoop up more stuff without flying right on top of it.

Distinction number two: your ship isn't a passive avatar, and it's not entirely defenseless either. You'll swoop through the environment, scooping up cash and power-ups, yes, but you'll also be fired upon by the enemy defenses the second you're in range. Luckily, you've got a shield, which can be refilled quickly by just hovering over a base -- a key strategy because it's possible and even encouraged to surround enemy defenses and just blast away at 'em until they're gone, then quickly replace them with your own.

Things quickly progress to the third distinction of Comet Crash's take on things: you can take the fight to the enemy. By building special ops bases, attacking units (drones and tanks in the tutorial) are regularly generated and sent to your base. The more factories you have cooking up units, the more you can send out at a time (accomplished by simply tilting the right analog stick in a directions and leaving it there until you've deployed those units). It demonstrates one of the biggest thrills of, well, any strategy game: amassing a huge army of units and then letting them loose, allowing you to enjoy the resulting chaos as you cackle madly, screaming to the heavens that none, not even the Almighty will stop you from decimating your enemies! AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!! Oh, just us, then? Ahem, right.

Lessons learned, we quickly put them to work in the starting stages of the Campaign Mode. Comet Crash actually allows for three-player co-op or four-player skirmishes, but they're local only (no online, sorry, kids). With the rest of the TPS staff busy doing beer bong hits or something, we decided to charge in all by our lonesome, but it was nevertheless plenty of fun even if flying solo. Things played out just as you'd suspect from the description above, with us building a meandering line of turrets to direct the enemy's troops to their slow-whittling doom until we'd amassed enough cash and firepower to start taking the fight to them.

It is a thing of beauty, seeing dozens and dozens of tanks all streaming in clumps toward their destination -- particularly when both sides are employing the brute force match, but we've really only scratched the surface of things. Rest assured that as we get closer to the game's (very near) release date that we'll have a full review of everything, 28 levels, 1080p visuals, custom soundtracks, ridiculously upgraded laser turrets 'n all. Check back soon for that, but don't forget to watch the trailer and check out a few of the screens we managed to pilfer to help better explain what we were rambling on about on these last two pages.