Space Oddity- Ion Assault Review

What’salmost worse than a bad game? Answer: a game with great potential onlypartially realized. You can easily ignore a bad game altogether, butthe better a game’s concept, the more painful it is to accept itsfaults. Ion Assault embodies this concept from start to finish.

Ion Assault is an arena shmup for the Xbox 360. After Geometry Wars‘spopularity ignited (and deservedly so), twin-stick arena shmups havebecome a dime-a-dozen. What developers often fail to realize isimitation is only worth doing when you have something new or differentto add to the concept. Fortunately, Ion Assault gets this right. Ion Assault‘smain draw is it’s excellent particle physics engine. Your ship has theability to create a gravitational pull which realistically draws in theplentiful ion particles strewn about each stage. Releasing the nowwhite-hot particles blasts them out of the front of your ship. Theparticles bounce off the edges of the stage and swirl about, requiringa bit of strategy to use them effectively. There are various power-upsas well, some of which utilize the particles interesting ways.

This is about where Ion Assault‘s originality ends. Imagine using this weapon system in a glorified version of Asteroids and you’ve got a pretty accurate idea of Ion Assault.The left stick moves your ship in 360 degrees, whereas the right stickatypically rotates the aim of your ship. The goal in each stage is toobliterate the entirety of all space junk and rocks. Enemies will spawnliberally to try to stop you. Why they hate that you’re cleaning uptheir mess, I don’t know. Other than the mostly uninteresting visualdesign there isn’t a whole lot of differentiation between one stage andthe next, and the action often falls flat. The main weapon feelsunderpowered and it often takes two fully charged shots just to crack alarge piece of debris. The aiming is very picky as well, and obstacles,enemies and even bosses do very little to let you know how effectiveyour shots are, if at all. Super Stardust HD, on the other hand, got this very right. Super Stardust HD also has Ion Assault‘s somewhat catchy but much too repetitive soundtrack beat any day.

Othertimes, the game falls into a flow where shots are landing just right,taking out enemies and obstacles alike. When you manage to quickly andrepeatedly re-grab the particles you just used, adding to thedestruction with each shot, it’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately thestages are often just too sparse, and the weapon just too underpowered,to create this kind of experience often. The game is also veryunbalanced in difficulty as it fluctuates oddly. The final boss ispossibly the easiest in the game. To top it of, the game is very shortand the ending is near non-existant. The game congratulates you andkicks you back to the title. It doesn’t even roll credits as if thedevelopers are ashamed.

Ion Assault isnot bad, but it’s not that good either. It’s a clever and even funconcept, but with little built around it. I was unable to try thecooperative campaign as it’s local play only. Perhaps there is more funto be had there. No one was playing the online versus mode either, evenon a Saturday night. Perhaps if free DLC was added Ion Assault would be worth the 800 points (~$10 USD) but, unless that happens, I recommend you steer clear.