Assault Heroes – Mini Review (Xbox Live Arcade)

I really enjoyed this game, even though it wasn’t long enough for me to bother with a full review. Seriously, in the time it would take me to write and format one, you could almost finish the game.

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.

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