The first thing that strikes you is the beautiful and stylish old school graphics. The screen, curved like an old cathode ray tube, reminded me of Fallout which I’ve been playing a lot. The colours are bright day glow neons and there are plenty of fast moving sprites to confuse you. Throw in a funky soundtrack by High Frequency Bandwidth and SideScroller really does scream arcade classic.

There’s not too much to think about in a game like this; it’s really down to reactions rather than major strategy. You’ve three choices of weapons, standard guns, lasers and then bombs with the usual sort of upgrades to improve the weapons, extra life and a temporary shield. Flicking between the weapons is as quick as pushing a button but you have to cycle through them which can be awkward if you are using lasers but need guns. Occasionally you need the other weapons, but I found it far easier to concentrate on using the machine guns and making sure you get all the power ups.

Level design is pretty nice but not going to win any awards. Carrying over from other PixelJunk games there are liquids in various parts of the game. These take the form of water, fire, acids, and some others. All bar one do damage to you in different ways. Since they are liquids, they tend to flow up or down following gravity and the level layout as you’d expect. Fire erupts, water drains down and so forth. The most important is water since this can help heal the ship from damage you’ve taken. Thing is, it actually took me a while to realize what these various things did. Since the game is so fast paced I spent a few levels rushing through the water as I thought I might take damage from it.

I tried the initial three different difficulty levels and even the easiest was very hard. The fourth difficulty level is called Brutal and if you really want to go that way you’ll need to finish the game on hard level first. While playing there are a large amount of check points and even if you run out of lives you can continue indefinitely. Down side of that is, if you run out of lives and restart at a check point you’ve lost any weapon upgrades you had. Now a trick I used was to just push as fast as possible through to those check points, I skipped killing a lot of things just to get there.

By the time I managed to clear the first stage I had practically destroyed my teeth in stress. The game is challenging, but for me a lot of that was more due to zoning out while staring at the screen. There’s so much going on and with the neon colour palette it can make it pretty hard to keep track of all the bullets flying around. Combine in the little collectibles and sometimes you fly straight into a bullet just because you think it’s supposed to be collected.

PixelJunk SideScroller is pretty great fun for the price. Just don’t expect to fly through in one go. Here watch a highlight video of my attempt at a level and laugh!

Pixel Junk SideScroller is available now from the PSN Store.

It’s not like there’s one single thing that sucks the fun out of it all. Almost every design choice away from the aesthetics is arguably borrowed from somewhere else but, most importantly, each is implemented in a way that hinders player progression. Each represents another blow against enjoyment. If there’s a choice for the developers to make between easy and hard, you get the hard every time. It’s maddeningly frustrating.

Take, for instance, the way the camera zooms right into our beleaguered whale as he gets closer to the bottom. This means the player is unable to very far ahead, making the navigation of a cloud infested sky all the more difficult. Yet this isn’t a choice – players have to collect rainbow drops to keep the whale moving forwards and these inexplicably exist at the bottom rather than the top in the vast majority of routes. A lack of rainbow drops means falling, and falling means death. You have to go down there, and you have to stay down there.

The highs are saved for exactly that which is a shame, they’re the best bits. Looping the loop, grabbing a star and munching on some clouds is majestic when you’re up there. Down here? In the cheap seats? It’s a slog. The glory of swimming along through the sky forgotten as I come across yet another impossible to predict or prepare for section of maze and slam the phone down in exasperation.

I like that I can do that when I game these days. It’s like dealing with an angry girlfriend. “I won’t even SPEAK TO YOU I’m so angry!”. *SLAM*

These problems aren’t helped by the procedurally generated levels. I don’t really know what that means, but I think it’s when the computer tries to randomise what you play to keep it fresh and exciting. Tiny Wings did one new set of areas every day and I’m pretty sure Whale Trail does too. Unfortunately, it does so in smaller chunks and it’s not uncommon to see the same couple of screens repeated on a single play through. It’s very disconcerting to just make it through a tricky bit only to be faced with the exact same challenge less than a minute later.

Linking into this are the fiddly, maze like areas you have to try to get through, desperately avoiding moving clouds, grabbing rainbow drops in a vain effort to keep your rainbow drop fuel tank full. These areas suck. The Whale making Trails should be all about big sweeping troughs and peaks, gliding majestically through the game as you swoop below clouds to grab a new reservoir. The main issue with that is that it would make it near identical to Tiny Wings.

So, instead, you get to try to make tiny movements through an obstacle course and through insanely tight spaces that you didn’t see until they were right on top of you thanks to the crappy camera and then you get zapped with lightning and fall out of the sky and get eaten by the evil shadow monster.

And breathe.

All the best bits of the game – the swooping, the seeing of your house from there, the last minute grabbing of rainbow drops – is interspersed through exercises in punishment and guesswork. The scoreboard shows there are people who love it, who have mastered it and gotten past that which I could not. Good for them, I’m happy for them.

I’m not happy when I play this, though. It makes me sad and angry in equal measure. With such artistic merit, with such near genius this could have actually been better than Tiny Wings. It’s so close. Instead it eschews this in favour of punishing me for wanting to play it. In the words of the Shatner, I can’t get behind that.

Whale Trail is available now for 69p from the iTunes store for iOS 4.1 or greater.

*ahem*

That’s right! Another Trials clone! I don’t care though. I don’t care about clones, or rehashes of the same game (endless runners, collect three things, whatever). The only measure of quality should be whether it is a good game, not if it is another good game of the same type. Bike Baron is an infuriatingly, annoyingly dumbfounding and addictive game. It is not, however, a good one.

It has everything you would expect. A motorbike, a rider, a feline passenger, devious courses and the ability to throw your weight backwards and forwards to aid a landing or get over an obstacle. It has ridiculous courses with a number of things to collect on them. It has a timer. It has course specific challenges that mean you’ll have to play each one multiple times to earn all 3 stars attributable to each. It has more advanced courses that unlock as you earn said stars. It has difficulty levels.

So far, so *yawn*.

The success of such a game hinges on two key elements: the physics of the bike and the deviousness of the level design. In the case of Bike Baron I can say only this – one of the hard levels requires you to purposefully force the rear wheel of the bike to clip through the scenery to get off of the starting line.

It’s a maddeningly frustrating game to play. Rather than design clever levels for a player to guide their motorised missile around, the developers appear to have come up with a handling model that can at best be described as ‘off’ and then built a game around that. Most levels outside of the upper echelons aren’t particularly difficult, more a war of attrition as you try to get the rotation of the bike and rider just right. Many solutions depend up on the player’s ability to game the system, to understand that the bike handles in a counter-intuitive manner and to bounce it across the finish line accordingly.

The challenges highlight this: complete the level without crashing, within a certain time or with all the coins collected. Yet these are often exclusive. There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ run. Racing through a course at break neck speeds, pulling off the manoeuvres your muscles have now memorised means you’ll be floating over them. Pausing to get them all results in crashes (inconsequential, they at least learned the instant restart is a key feature, not a nice to have) and longer times.

It’s all just so workman like. So uninspired and tepid.

Why, then, am I struggling to tell you to run for the hills, to dodge this over-hyped, over-reviewed monstrosity of a game that doesn’t deserve your time?

In short, there’s something amazingly charming about how inadequate it is. None of the levels are brilliantly designed masterpieces of physics based puzzling; they’re just a bit half arsed and tricky to beat. The bike isn’t a wonderful central vehicle that responds perfectly to an expert player’s skills; it’s wonky and rubbish and does things it shouldn’t really do. The challenges aren’t, well, particularly challenging in the main; unlocking every level and beating all 3 is pretty easy for ¾ of the time you’ll spend playing it.

Yet it manages to be a game that’s more than the sum of its parts. Whether it’s the comedy “oohs” and “aahs” as you make a jump (almost as endearing as Whale Trails “I can see my house from here”), or that instant reset just one more go hook that it manages to sink, I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I continued to play it long past the point where I decided it was a bit shit and still want to go back and take on those stupid, stupid Extreme levels and beat them. In a world where it’s so easy to quit, hold, delete any title that fails to meet our lofty expectations, I count that as a success.

You can buy Bike Baron now on iOS for 69p.

The plot is a simple one and is told through a comic strip style in every cutscene. You are part of a group of mercenaries known as the Renegades and your mission is to stop the evil overlord ‘Inferno’ from destroying the world at all costs. There are four characters to choose from and, as you would expect from an all-out, balls-to-the-wall action game, Renegade Ops is not afraid to dole out the action title clichés even before you step in your car.

L-R: Gunnar, Armand, Roxy, Diz, Inferno and Bryant

You’ve got good looking white guy, token tough black guy, rock/biker chick and assassin girl, who all have their own cars and special attacks however that’s as far as the difference between the characters goes. Each car drives exactly the same, so who you choose solely depends on your mood. I would’ve liked to have seen a bit more variety among the characters apart from different special weapons, maybe involving a class system of sorts.

The setting of Renegade Ops changes over its nine missions quite dramatically. From the jungle to the beach, to battling a huge aircraft carrier and finally on to an underground labyrinth of tunnels and traps as you negotiate Inferno’s base. The map is completely open plan so you can get from point to point using a variety of different paths. However, the main missions have time limits which restrict you straying away from the beaten path too much. This is a shame as the game on the whole is very well presented, so it’s disappointing that you don’t get a chance to see it all. The explosions are loud and satisfying and small buildings collapse into dust as you smash through them at full speed.

Renegade Ops’ main control system revolves around the two analogue thumbsticks; the left controls your vehicle’s movement, the right controls which direction your primary weapon fires (and you only need to aim it to unleash a hellfire of bullets at the enemy). It’s an interesting idea that does take a bit of getting used to, especially if you’re suited to using the shoulder buttons to control your vehicle, but when you get the hang of it, the control system works well, a necessity in a game as fast paced as this. Enemies come at you from all sides so your best bet is to keep moving and shooting as the action is frenetic from the outset.

Of course, it’s not just you that can take part in this insane action; up to 4 friends can take the wheels of their respective death machines via split screen co-op or over Xbox Live so you can all work as a team to take Inferno and his henchmen down and save the day. However, in practice, tactics go out in the window as it becomes a free-for-all for the powerups and health which can leave the less assertive players taking an early bath. Until that point Renegade Ops is a fun experience with a few cohorts, although I felt I got more enjoyment playing through the single player on my own.

One of the things that really irked me about Renegade Ops, however is the voice acting. It’s some of the worst I’ve seen since the first Resident Evil and that’s saying something. The leader of the Renegades ‘Bryant’ is your typical army general type, albeit with a walrus moustache who’s been given the voice of Shaft, despite being white. Similarly, Inferno’s über-bad-guy role is punctuated with some of the most over-the-top acting I’ve ever heard. Some say this just adds to the ‘cheesiness’ of Renegade Ops, but ended up annoying the hell out of me at times.

As you frag your way through Inferno’s almost never-ending waves of bad guys and complete the various main and side missions, you gain experience points which can be used to level up your vehicle’s defensive, offensive and special abilites. However, you can only have a maximum of four powers active at one time, as they don’t stack like we’ve seen in games like Borderlands. This creates an air of tactics for Renegade Ops.

On the face of things, this game looks like a brainless shooter but as I got further in I started to mix up the abilities depending on the mission ahead. If I kept dying at a certain point, I went back to the talent tree and see what wasn’t working, and really thought about what ability suited the situation.

Talking of dying, you better get used to it because that’s what you’ll be doing a lot of when you first pick up Renegade Ops. You begin with 3 lives and how used to the game you are will determine how often you die. Even though you may have cracked it, Renegade Ops will creep up on you and take one of your precious lives away with something that you had no way of expecting. When those lives have gone, that’s it. Game Over. No Continues. With each mission lasting about 30 minutes, to get almost to the end and then be ganked by a boss and be put back at the start is frustrating to say the least. Here’s where the tactics come in again. You’re forced to move and fire, looking for a chink in the enemies’ armour. You WILL beat Inferno, it’s all a question of when.

Renegade Ops assumes little and promises even less, however what it delivers for under a tenner is some pretty sweet visuals, a tight control system and an extremely fun action gaming experience. It’s like the modern video game version of Rambo or Commando. You’re not expected to take it too seriously. Just have fun blowing stuff up and beating the bad guy like old times. If you suspend your disbelief (and put reality aside), Renegade Ops is one ass-kicking little package.

Renegade Ops is out now on XBLA (1200 MSP), PC and PSN (£9.99).

There is something inherently pleasurable about idly sending planes hither and thither across patchwork fields and blue seas, simply by drawing on screen, whilst a noodling jazz soundtrack plays in the background. Needless to say, the relative calm of the first few minutes soon gives way to a more challenging task, and at times you will have twenty or more planes on the screen, all of which appear to have a death wish.

The Move control scheme works beautifully, allowing you to effortlessly draw any type of path for the aircraft. You can even keep individual planes ‘circling’, whilst you try to clear some space in the sky. It is possible to use a regular Dualshock controller to play the game, but this doesn’t feel nearly as satisfying, and it shows its limitations once the levels get very busy. A nice touch is the ability for up to four players to play at once, using any combination of Move and Dualshock controllers.

There are 9 levels in total, which each hold their own challenges, including day/night cycles, emergency landings and changing wind directions. All of these levels are unlocked from the start, so there is no progression as such. The focus here is on high scores, and achieving a higher ‘rank’ on the global leaderboards, starting as ‘Cabin Crew’ and working your way up to the heady heights of ‘Test Pilot’

Visually the game is clean and simple, with just enough detail to be interesting, but not enough to distract from the task at hand. Flight Control HD supports 3D televisions, but I am sadly not in a position to comment on the effectiveness of this. The sound effects are mostly helpful, and the soundtrack initially fits the game quite well. Unfortunately here lies the one problem that I had with the game – it only appears to have one music track. Not only that, but the track doesn’t loop, playing just once per level, before leaving you in silence.

This is a very strange design decision, but it can be overcome in one of two ways. Firstly, you can switch the music off and on from the pause menu, which will restart the solitary track. Alternatively, the game supports custom soundtracks, so you can start some appropriate music from your XMB and then go back to the game. Personally I found that a bit of Joanna Newsom provided a nice accompaniment. Combining anything faster than that with the stresses of air traffic control just didn’t seem like a good idea to me.

Flight Control HD costs £3.99 from the PSN Store, which is definitely good value for money. It is a great pick up and play game, that initially seems very simple, but quickly provides a very real challenge. It is also one of the few games that really benefits from having a Playstation Move control scheme. One word of warning though – the game is very addictive, so a quick twenty minute session may end up taking longer than you thought.

Medieval Games Wii crosses board games with party gaming in a Middle Ages setting. Sadly though, for multiplayer gamers it fails pretty miserably.

I’ve seen multiplayer games that are impossible to pick up and play, games that require only the briefest of tutorials and games that blossom from seeming simplicity into headache inducing tactical warfare. Rather surprisingly, we’ve yet to come across a game that needs no tutorial, is simple for all yet fails to engage one single player. Medieval Games is that game.

Medieval Games is a party game that you can play either alone, against the computer or with friends – no online content to speak of. Like Wii-Play or Wii-Sports, Medieval Games is a collection of mini-games. But the twist here is the introduction of a board game format, presumably to give the game a little bit more spice and an element of luck.

Not a million miles from Mario Party, four players start at the entrance to a maze. Rolling a dice, you are then allowed to move your character until you land on a game. These are then either solo play or all play – although even the solo play involves the rest of your party. For example, in one solo player game you need to dance around over four coloured squares while your opponents throw banana skins onto the dance floor in an effort to trip you up. In another, you need to capture three pigs while your opponents control the little squealers. And both of them are dreadful.

With no online play, I had to wait till my house had some guests in it to play this multiplayer. The kind of guests who, when they hear the words new game get all excited and competitive. So it was a Saturday night before Medieval Games came out of its case. A quick character selection later, and the four of us were ready to play, hunkered down around the TV, gaming thumbs itching like crazy. Five minutes later, I had a living room full of disappointed gamers calling for my head.

Best Multiplayer Moments

The only half decent game here is the fruit shooting, which is about as fun as walking away from paint that’s only half dry.

Multiplayer Verdict

There are other, more Medieval minigames in this game, such as jousting and sword fighting, but we never made it to them simply because it was such a disappointing start. Be wary of picking this up – your children may enjoy it but if your a multiplayer gaming fan of any type, Medieval Games will just make you want to turn it off and play something else.

Should you have kids or want to make up your own mind, Medieval Games for the Wii is available for only £12.99 on Play.com

Find more anecdotal reviews at Game People.

I also remember watching the awesome intro to Alien Breed: Tower Assault at the consumer electronics show Live ’95 in London. Wow, that intro was really amazing for its time. I also played Alien Breed 3D on the Amiga A1200, which I enjoyed more than Doom. So, yeah, I’ve had a long, long history with Alien Breed. Getting back up to date, I wrote a post last week announcing the release of Alien Breed 2: Assault last week. So now I’ve had a chance to spend some time playing it, here’s what I think.

Starting off, slowly….

Everything starts off well, with a nice cartoon summary of all the events in the previous game (Alien Breed: Evolution), but for some reason I couldn’t start the game. It just kept looping through the intro again and again. So after 30 mins of trawling through the Steam forums I found the answer. I had to recheck the game cache, which then identified 2 missing/corrupt files. New files were downloaded (automatically) and installed and a few mouse clicks later I was finally playing Alien Breed 2: Assault. Mmm, not the greatest start I think you’ll agree.

Anyway, the game itself is an isometric third person shooter/handyman/FedEx delivery person game, set on an Alien space ship, filled with nasty aliens (surprisingly!) and darkness. There are 5 levels to play in the single player campaign all of which involve you getting from point A to point B (following all the waypoints) whilst killing and repairing almost everything that you come across. With a lot of backtracking. There’s so much backtracking that it is almost pointless exploring some of the corridors and rooms that make up the levels as you will cover every inch several times. This got very irritating on the 2nd level, when I had to backtrack to practically the very beginning of the level from pretty much half way through as I had to retrieve a personnel database for a security door that had just broken. Annoying, and a little bit dull. Fortunately each level only takes about an hour to complete, which was just about the limit of my interest.

Dad, it’s broken!

In space, every thing’s broken or will break, at least that’s what I learned form playing Alien Breed 2: Assault. If you touch things there’s a strong chance it will break. Doors, windows, computers, pumps and generators to name but a few of the things that suffer from your killer touch. So you either have to either divert around the broken bit or (more commonly) locate a part to fix (which usually involves backtracking). You also have to be very careful of all the explosions (nice, pretty explosions), as everything explodes when you get close to it. Must be that killer touch again! Oh, and the ship shakes. Like, shakes all the fricking time. For virtually the whole of the first level the screen constantly shook. Wobble, wobble, wobble, explosion, door fuse blow, wobble, explosion wobble! I get the fact that the ship you are on is a bit broken (having just crashed our own ship into the side of it), but seriously, enough with the screen shaking. I get it. After about of hour of playing I needed a break, as I found it too tiring to deal with for any longer. The shaking got better (i.e. less) after this, but it is still something to be aware of. It can be quite off-putting.

Save when you can

The graphics are pretty good throughout with some nicely detailed spaceship interiors. There are lovely smoke effects and lighting effects in the game which really show off the power of the Unreal 3 engine as you wander around with your little torch. The aliens are varied in design and size with some of them are right little nippy buggers and quite a challenge to kill, especially when about 20 of them gang up on you and attack from all angles. Clever.

Weapons are equally varied, with flamethrowers, rocket launchers, shotguns and the trusty pulse rifle all ready for action. Ammo and items like health packs or frag grenades can be found throughout the levels either out in the open or by searching dead bodies. You’ll also find supply terminals dotted throughout each level from which you can also buy ammo, weapons and items. As there are only a few of these terminals on each level you have to be very careful not to die before you reached one. They are the only places where you can save your progress. This does lead to some fairly tense moments as you battle through waves of aliens to get to the save point. I did quite enjoy the sense of urgency and mild panic that these fixed saved points added to the overall gameplay. Tension is further heightened by the in-game music which bears more than a passing resemblance to the music from the Alien films. A very welcome addition to the game ;-)

You will get about 6 hours of gameplay out of the single player campaign which isn’t really that long to be honest. Obviously there is a lot more fun to be had with the 2 player co-op and the survivor modes both of which are great additions the the game. The survivor mode is really good as you are pitted against endless alien attacks and you have to last as long as possible. This is total alien carnage on a grand scale.

Summary

Alien Breed 2: Assault is a simple, well constructed shooter with a few problems (screen constantly shaking and incessant backtracking). It is the kind of game that you can play for an hour or so to kill some time. However, it is not a game you will come back to again and again as the gameplay just isn’t that complex or fulfilling. For the price, I’d recommend it as a great casual purchase and it’s a decent enough addition to the Alien Breed game series.

Alien Breed 2: Assault is out now on Xbox 360 (800 Microsoft Points – Xbox Live Arcade) and PC (£6.99 on Steam).

Update 9th Oct 2010: It just played Alien Breed 2: Assault with an Xbox 360 controller hooked up to my PC (using the Wireless Gaming Receiver For Windows (Xbox 360)). Unsurprisingly, given that the game is also on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), the keyboard controls map perfectly to the Xbox controller. In fact, I prefer playing this game using a joypad than the keyboard. I can just sit back, put my feet up and blast away at the aliens ;-)

Well, our FIRST first impression was pretty terrible. The starter kit arrived with a faulty PS Eye camera, so we spent far too much time plugging in, unplugging, twiddling with cables and generally not playing. Once we figured out the problem and got a replacement, it all got much better.

Popped in the starter disc – every demo needs to be installed before you can play :( Cue ages of press install button, go do something else, come back, press button for next demo. 30 minutes later, we were finally up and running.

I’m impressed by the tracking. It’s everything that we expected the Wii to be. The PS3 knows where the pointer is and the direction it’s pointing, which opens up lots of good melee weaponry opportunities. But hey, we’re the voice of the average gamer over here. If you want a thorough deconstruction of the tech, go read a tech blog. Nick and I are here to tell you if it’s fun. In between building our new games events site, we’ve been playing through the available demos this weekend:

Are they any good?

Echochrome II is booooring. Wave a torch around and watch the shadows form new shapes. Ooooooo, mind-blowing! Not. Yes, I appreciate that you probably need quite a bit of expertise to build good challenging levels, and there is a design mode for those of you who like that sort of thing. We both got bored playing within minutes.

Stacking up virtual children's blocks? No thanks.

Kung Fu Rider has a crazy concept – push your speeding office chair down the street to escape the Mafia, duck or jump obstacles and use roundhouse kicks to destroy anyone in your way. Sounds like it could be fun. In practice… yup, you guessed it. Booooring. Maybe I was doing it wrong and I should have been sitting down like I was actually in an office chair. The fact is, I simply don’t care enough about this type of game to give it another go. Might be a good party game. I’ll revisit next week after we get a load of friends round to try it out.

Watch the Monkey!

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 crippled me. I have chronic lower back pain, normally nothing too serious but 5 minutes with this game has made me practically couch-ridden :\ I realise that I’m probably doing it wrong so golf fans should try this one out for themselves. It’s a little annoying that you need to use a normal controller for menu navigation but gamewise… well, I’m crap with a golf club and crap with a PS Move golf sim, so it seems representative to me ;)

Imma slo-mo' sharpshootin' cowgirl

Right, I’m off to further aggravate my back with a spot of painkillers and Sports Champions Archery. We’ll get a full review up later in the week and cover the rest of the available demos.

Age rating: 3+ (PEGI)

What is it?

An asteroids clone (high-def update of the Amiga classic Super Stardust)

Is it fun?

Yes.

Is it worth the money? £4.99 (from the UK Playstation Store)

Yes.

Why?

Ok, so I was amazed to find something I actually wanted to buy from the UK Playstation Store a few days ago. That something was Super Stardust HD. I’ve actually played the original Super Stardust AGA* on my Amiga A1200 back in 1996. I can say that I’ve had just as much fun with this updated version 11 years later (oooh, I feel old now).

Apart from the visuals and the music it’s still pretty much the same game. But then again, it’s asteroids so it’s a fairly one dimensional game in the first place. Blow-up asteroids, collect weapon power-ups, blow-up more asteroids and then battle the end of world boss. Repetitive, yes, but entertaining as well.

The fun in Super Stardust HD comes from all the wanton destruction. It is total and utter carnage right from the word go. You really have to concentrate – like an badger on red bull – the whole time in order to stay alive. The continual onslaught of asteroids and aliens is quite staggering and also mind numbing. All this in 1080p and without a hit of slow down. Yay. Bring it on!

Housemarque – Super Stardust HD’s developer – have also added a co-op mode into the mix which only suffices to double the carnage during the game. Hehe, fantastic. So grab a mate and give this mode a bash.

My only quibble with this HD version is that sometimes the eye candy (of which there is a lot) can make seeing the tiny, tiny asteroid shards a bit of pain. This frequently leads to you losing a very precious life. Irritating, but you learn to live with it. Oh, and it’s a tough little bugger of a game, so don’t expect to whiz through the 5 worlds on your first go.

In summary: It’s a cheapy-cheap, high-def, super pretty version of asteroids that contains a seriously intense gameplay experience.

Screenshots:

* You can download an mp4 of someone completing the whole game (57m 27s) from Recorded Amiga Games.

Update 4th Jul 07: Forgot to mention that the gameplay in Super Stardust takes place around a planet (i.e. curved play area), unlike Asteroids which has a flat play area. Oh, and I’d suggest changing the camera setting to “far” so you can see what the hell is going on, as the initial camera is set just too close to the action. Yep, that covers everything.

Assault Heroes a fun little single/co-op player top-down shooter. You have a couple of vehicles and nice assortment of weapons: a flamethrower for infantry, a flak cannon for armoured objects and the mini-gun for pretty much everything. There are weapon and shield power-ups but a notable lack of new lives. I found that very strange. Anyway, it’s a simple run-around-and-shoot-everything-that-moves kind of game. There are a couple of truly inspired levels. There’s also one really annoying design “feature”.

Battling a boss is not much of a strategic exercise. It’s more like a war of attrition, with all the morale-dropping tedium that it implies. Sure, there are weak spots but mostly it’s very dull and quite frustrating.

No matter. In co-op mode it’s done with the minimum of fuss and you’re away to the next level. The main game only lasted us two evening sittings and we were rather drunk on at least one of them. We were playing medium mode as well. You couldn’t describe Assault Heroes as a complex game. I suspect it would have been much better had it come after the recent announcement that Xbox Live Arcade games could be triple their current size.

There’s some replay value – we haven’t finished the underground levels and I still need five of the twelve achievements. All but one of them look quite feasible, so it’s worth trying. I have no illusions over my accuracy in this type of game, so I’ll probably never get the sharpshooter requirement of 70%. I’m hovering more around the 22% mark at the moment.

In short, Assault Heroes is fun and mindless. Very good pick-up-and-play entertainment for the usual 800 Microsoft points, or about £6.80.

Related Links
Assault Heroes Achievements List
Assault Heroes Official Site. It’s Flash-based and noisy.

More Screenshots: