As a shooter, Robotech: The New Generation brings a new wrinkle by letting you transform your Veritech spaceship into a mechanized robot. You're told by a series of anime cut-scenes that Scott Bernard is one of the last surviving humans whose sole goal now is to launch a (at least it feels like one) suicide assault on the Invid enemy after they devastated the human population. Hordes of Invid ships will swarm you from all sides as you dodge enemy fire and swoop in to collect power ups. The game is relentlessly fast-paced but not so frenetic that you think you'll develop a seizure while you watch all the flashy explosions or try to hide in that special corner of the screen where you aren't hit by billiard ball like projectiles.

This game appears designed for the mobile gamer. As a shooter, it automatically switches to auto-fire so one can comfortably play with a single hand. What you want to avoid doing, though, is trying to multi-task. This isn't one of those games you want to be playing at a ticket booth barking incoherent orders because it'll demand your undivided attention to get through all but the basic sequences. Typical of these games, you dispatch so many bad guys it makes Die Hard seem like a kids short film. Luckily, the sequences are short enough you won't find yourself looking for a save button in the middle of the stages.

The power up design isn't anything you haven't seen before. There are satellite drones that can surround you to help you do the fighting. You get bigger badder guns and bombs and such. If you're dutiful, close to the end of the stage, you'll amass so much firepower the petty drones that the Invids throw at you will become nothing more than fodder for a fourth of July fireworks show. On the other hand, the boss characters usually require more finesse in identifying their weakness or pattern to bring down rather than the spray and pray tactics you used on the regular Invid ships.

The graphics are colorful and fit nicely to the cell phone screen. I liked the fact that they included a soundtrack instead of a litany of boom boom sound effects. And the unlockable characters with their different Veritech fighter/mech combinations is good enough to get you to at least try the game a second time to experiment. If you enjoy shooters, you should enjoy this Robotech game. If you're looking for something more engrossing in the Robotech universe, though, you may have to look somewhere else. While this game has anime cutscenes, Veritech fighters and robots, it's not what you would call a deep involving role playing experience. But put it up against that other mobile game this summer (cough, cough, Transformers), I enjoyed this one a lot better.