Ion Assault is beautiful.  Beautifully presented particles whizz around the stages, things explode with glorious fanfare, and there is enough eye candy to make you drool.  Unfortunately, it’s somewhat lacking in the gameplay and innovation departments, with extremely frustrating controls to boot.  But…I also suck at two-stick shooters…

Ion Assault is a new release for Xbox LIVE Arcade from the Munich-based game development team Coreplay.  As I mentioned above, it’s a two-stick shooter, where the object of the game is to suck up ammo (particles) by holding down the left trigger, then releasing the sucked up ammo into a blast of energy by letting go of the trigger.  You generally wanna fire this stuff at the asteroids or baddies trying to gun you down, but I enjoyed just shooting the walls and watching everything bounce around, which is probably why I died so often.

Yay! Particles!

As in every other one of these games, avoiding everything whizzing around while destroying everything in your path is the main objective, but confusingly you are able to slam into the asteroids and not die.  The player’s ship is only destroyed when they get shot by a baddie or smash face-first through their windshield.  This seemed like an extremely odd design decision, as it lowers the danger rating considerably for the player.  I definitely found myself involuntarily avoiding the asteroids, dying because I don’t notice the tiny kamikaze AI pilot screaming “BANZAI” as he turns me into ions.

When talking about Ion Assault, it’s impossible to not talk about Geometry Wars and the old-skool Asteroids.  Ion Assault is very derivative of these two games and relies heavily on its “suck-up-the-ions” mechanic to separate itself from the pack.  This does add a bit of differentiation, forcing players to set up shots where they can recover their just blasted ion shot after it bounces off the walls, but unfortunately (or fortunately, if you love Geometry Wars) the mechanic was not enough to make it feel exceedingly innovative.

The controls are another gripe of mine.  While using the second stick to aim, but not shoot, is part of the crux of the gameplay mechanic, it was often frustrating to align shots in the correct manner. Unlike Geometry Wars where your gun can shoot in a full 360 arc, your ion cannon in Ion Assault can only fire from the tip of your vehicle.  This design decision worked fine for Asteroids, and would have worked fine for Ion Assault if the spacecraft didn’t always seem to rotate the wrong direction.  I would constantly be aiming at 6:00, hit the right stick towards about 1:30 and watch as the spacecraft spun around clockwise, instead of the shorter counter-clockwise direction I had wanted.  Many words I shan’t repeat here were spoken loudly at the television screen.

As I began this review, I did make note of the beautiful graphics, to which some attention must be paid.  The particles are swirly marvelousy goodness(y), especially when some of the special items are deployed, and the chaos really gets flowing when stuff is flying all over the place.  It does occasionally get so chaotic that you can’t even see what enemy smashed into you, but that comes with the genre…

Despite the drawbacks, two-stick shooter fans really should enjoy this one.  I focused on the flaws here, but overall the game is a solid offering for fans of the genre.  Going for massive combos to yield the highest score is good clean fun, though the limited campaign offering makes the game a stretch at $10.

Our Score: 7 /10

Crazy particles and two-stick action will entertain fans for hours.

I really wanted to try out the multiplayer, but unfortunately I don’t have any friends in real life (to do split-screen with!) and after waiting 30 minutes in an Xbox LIVE multiplayer lobby looking for a game, I gave up.  If I do happen to make some friends (kidnap my neighbor), or I manage to get in a multiplayer game, you will definitely see this part updated!