Ion Assault

81 / 100
Neat Asteriods clone updated for the 21st century with intense close combat & relentless 'bullet hell' gameplay. Visually very detailed, great particle effects & animations, & good replayability as you keep pushing for better combos & scores.
It won't take you long to get through the Story mode (honestly its pretty short), but its still fun to replay trying different techniques & master the control of your particle weapon to get the bigger chain combos. Your weapon works by sucking in the surrounding particles then shooting them out at high velocity. More particles the bigger the shot & they can also rebound for bonus damage. They can be used in defence too. Can be a bit tricky to get the hang of it but once you do you'll find yourself smoothly clearing the arena inflicting maximum destructive force!
The game arena itself is not much bigger than a single screen (there is some minimal scrolling), a confined busy space, which enhances the fierce action!
For me, the real challenge came in the Survival mode, where endless waves keep coming & you must last as long as you can - I found this the most enjoyable part of the game. Difficulty in Survival scales quickly & may be frustrating for a casual gamer, but personally I found it addictive.
One thing I wish they would update though is to have controller support in the menus - currently unsupported (works in-game not in menus!), but besides some limited content & the controller menu support this is a cool & rather unique little shoot 'em up.
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Length of Time Played: 6 Hours
Distance Played: Beat the Game
Personal Grade: C+
Opinion of Each Aspect
Grading System - Outstanding, Excellent, Good, Acceptable, Poor, Horrendous, Abysmal
Gameplay: Acceptable
Controls: Good
Graphics: Acceptible
Stability: Acceptable
Difficulty: Good
Sounds: Acceptable
Music: Horrendous
Story: N/A
Notes: + (Positives), = (Small Gripes), - (Negatives)
+ Constatly engaging gameplay keeps you on your feet.
+ Plenty of power-ups to assist you in staying alive.
+ Unique way of killing enemies by absorbing particles.
= There can be so much stuff on the screen at once that it can be disorienting.
- Enemy fire can blend in with the background which can result in some rather cheap deaths.
- The music is bland and uninspiring which takes away from the gameplay.

This was a pretty good little asteroids clone that uses a charge shot as it's main gimmick. I had to run it with Windows 7 compatibility or else the game would start stuttering due to what I think might be a memory leak. Also if you press "C" for some weird reason the game crashes. (it's not a bug! It's a feature!)
My only real complaints are that sometimes you shoot an enemy and have no idea if it connected or not. There's no feedback and it makes you second guess yourself all the time. The game took me about 3 hours to finish but I think anymore levels would've spread the game a little too thin. After 3 hours you've pretty much seen everything the game had to offer anyway.
Also there's a few references to Darius that I loved (level transitions, huge boss approaching, fish enemies) so look out for those ;-)
TLDR: Great game, run it on W7 compatibility mode and buy it on discount.

This is a unique and enjoyable little shoot-em up. Whereas most shmups are about precision movement with wildly imprecise shooting of bullets everywhere, this changes it up with it's mechanic wherein you need to gather up enough matter from the map to shoot out. The result is that you have to get skilled at shooting precisely, because if you waste a shot, you have to gather up particles again for the next try. Often if I wasn't sure if I could be precise enough, I would opt to move in really close before taking the shot. It's very fast paced and challenging. At first it was a bit overwhelming with so many particles moving on the screen, but I got over that quickly. They made good art choices which kept the enemies or shots from getting drowned out by the particles, so it was very seldom that anything snuck up on me in the chaos. All around, I was very impressed with the art for this game. Often 2D shmups are made with far less eye candy.
The one bad thing I'll say is that I was rather frustrated by their level progression system. There isn't really a save file that you can continue from. Instead you just permanently unlock levels by beating them, which would be fine except that it doesn't do it by stages, it does it by the larger chapters, of which there are only 4 in the game. This means you have to beat 25% of the game at a time to make any permanent progress. If you call it quits for the night on stage 3-5, then next time you have to start again at 3-1. On the bright side, while you're in a playthrough, you can keep hitting continue when you die, so you don't get sent all the way back for that, just for closing down the game session.
Don't let that flaw stop you from getting it however. It's a great game, but you just need to make sure you have a chunk of time to devote to it if you want to make progress.

At first, it can be visually overwhelming, there are particles flying everywhere on the screen.
But soon, as you start sensing about where your ship should be, and master the control, that stops being a problem, and you're free to fully enjoy drifting through the "cosmic supper", in an exceptional visual spectacle.
It is fairly challanging, but it's about right, just enough to give you a sense of purpose and achievement.
It never went overboard to becoming stressful.
I just wish it had more diversity. Maybe an upgradeable ship, other challanges, skills / other power-ups, more remarkable locations, etc.
It is an OK formula, but it can't keep you for long, given what today's gaming has to offer.
The later stages don't add anything new, it's just more of the same, with some visual changes, and as a result, the campaign is very short.

Asteroids with pretty particles and more dynamic gameplay. The only real issue I have with it is that enemies don't always respond to damage dealt, so there were moments when I doubted my approach. But no, just shoot everything.

Ion Assault
pros:
//fast game with modern day graphics with easy controls that moves from location A to B to C and so on
//good amount of action and special effects
cons:
//a lot difficult battles
//good game
Personal Suggested Purchase Price: $0.49 Or Less During Sale