Assault Heroes may not stray too far from the top-down shooter formula, but the beautiful graphics, great sound, and tight gameplay make it stand a cut above the rest.
The mechanics are familiar and simple. You control a small buggy (from a bird’s eye view) with the left stick, armed with a submachine gun, a flak cannon and a flamethrower, all of which are readily available from the get go and upgradeable as you proceed. You fire and aim with the right stick, and use the B button to exit your vehicle. The right and left bumpers rotate through your weapons, while the left and right triggers fire an explosive nuke that destroys just about everything within a certain radius. The game scrolls upwards or sideways (depending on the area) at a good pace, but will slow or stop if you do.
Your default weapon is the submachine gun. With unlimited ammo and a solid feel, this will become your backbone throughout the game. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel underpowered compared to the flamethrower or flak cannon, which both have limited ammo but do much more damage. The flamethrower is powerful and can be effectively used on just about everything the game sends at you, while the flak cannon is more suited for boss fights or larger enemies. Both the submachine gun and the flamethrower are easy to aim and can take out many enemies at once, but the flak cannon can be frustrating at times because the right analogue stick is not perfect when precise aim is required. This is a minor complaint though, as after a few tries you will figure out the right angle required to hit what you want. You have three nukes available on each level, and they become incredibly useful in situations where you’re swarmed by enemies.
Weapon damage and other upgrades are scattered around levels; in some cases in places you can only reach by getting out of your vehicle. These moments need to be done quickly, as one hit taken outside of your vehicle will kill you. On the other hand, when you’re in your vehicle you can take a pretty significant amount of damage (and it even slowly replenishes health over time) before it is destroyed. When that happens, you are relegated to just you and your tiny peashooter for a few desperate seconds, until a new vehicle materializes. You only lose a life when hit outside of your vehicle, so you essentially get a second chance, however intense and slim it might be. This is a neat feature, and brings you more into the game as you frantically dodge fire from all directions while waiting on your new ride.
The game is split up into zones and areas. A zone typically consists of a few areas, which serve as checkpoint locations. The distance between checkpoints (or “areas”) is just about perfect; long enough to be fun; short enough to not be frustrating when you have to retry. There are also optional underground scenes which can be a nice break from the sometimes overwhelming intensity of the game. You’ll come across platforms which, when driven onto, will transport your human soldier down into an underground corridor crawl. It plays just like the main game, but with a little closer perspective and the ability for your character to take damage before he dies. These scenes are pretty short and not as hard as the rest of the game, but still really fun.
What really separates Assault Heroes from the slew of similar games on Xbox Live Arcade is the graphics. Everything is bright, colorful, and smooth. The environments constantly impress; trees burn when hit with the flamethrower; rain and lightning pounds down all around you; your craft leaves its marks and makes wakes in water; and enemies shoot, die, and explode wonderfully. There are even short cut-scenes to move the story along, which mostly just consists of driving around and kicking ass.
There is a load of great enemies to fight, from massive boss monstrosities to crazy, hollering kamikaze soldiers who rush at you in droves and explode when hit, to tanks and helicopters; everything impresses and feels perfectly balanced.
The single player game has three modes of difficulty, and as you might expect, easy is pretty easy, medium is challenging but not unfair, and hard is well, hard. Campaign-wise, the game will only take an hour or two, depending on your skill level and the difficulty you set it to; however, replaying missions for achievement points and high scores will take up much more of your time, as some of the achievements are very difficult. On top of that, two-player co-op both online and off is available.
Assault Heroes combines old-school gameplay with fresh, stylized graphics into a really great game, and anyone with even a faint interest in Arcade games should definitely check this out.
-Solid two-stick shooter controls
-Beautiful environments
-Xbox Live and local co-op play
-Addictive
Final Score: 7/10
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