The latest in a growing string of space shooter titles to grace Xbox Live Arcade changes things up, by offering a sideways look at side-scrolling shooters. Rather than the usual left-to-right or top-to-bottom non-stop spaceship blasting, Aces Of The Galaxy puts the camera behind your ship; giving you a third-person view of what the cockpit sees. Despite the shiny new camera angle and flashy graphics, the title feels as though it was raised by old school games, and then forgot where it came from.
The story, what there is of it, is told in pre-level text-based messages. The basic premise is that you, a human, have stolen an alien spacecraft from their base and are attempting to make off with it, with loads of alien baddies on your escape trail. It is as good of a story as you are likely to get from a shooter, and you are likely to care just as much as usual. This genre is all about action, difficulty, and sore thumbs. Sadly, the game only delivers on two of three.
You begin the game by selecting one of three ships for battle, although with no specs or discernable differences, it is more of a visual preference than anything else. Once you have selected your ship, it is straight into battle against a steady stream of alien spaceships. You get small variety of weapons at your own disposal, with only a jittery rail gun, torpedoes, and cluster missiles ready to fire off. With no rapid fire to the rail gun, your thumb can really get a work out in a hurry.
Both the torpedoes and cluster missiles must reload after using, which takes a few seconds each time. Torpedoes are the easiest of your two power weapons to fire, as you only need a red target over an enemy to send them in a single baddie's direction. Slightly less powerful, but more effective against swarms, are the cluster missiles. While they lack the pure firepower, you have the ability to fire them off at multiple enemies at once. Holding down the 'X' button, then scanning over the enemies you want to hit will target them. Releasing the button fires off the missiles, destroying a handful of enemy ships at once; which helps with your scoring multiplier.
The faster you destroy enemies, the higher your score multiplier goes. The game is fairly demanding when it comes to keeping your multiplier active, as even a couple of seconds without a kill will reduce it back to nothing. Helping in this regard, you can pick up weapon upgrades along the way, increasing the number of cluster missiles you fire at once and increasing the strength of the other two. Typically, the game lines up upgrades for all three in a row; forcing you to choose what you want help with at that time. The game also leaves health and warp drops in each level. Health drops are just a nice bonus until late in the game, while the warps are to show off the various levels in the game.
At the end of the first level, you have the opportunity to select which of the three branching paths you would like to play. Each level has an Asteroid, Fire, and Ice level to choose from. After the first level, players who pick up warp drops in a level get to choose which landscape they tackle next. If you fail to pick up the warp drop, you continue down the same path you last selected. While there are technically twenty-eight levels,with a total of ten levels needed to beat the game, they all play just about the same. The same style of enemies is found on each level, with the same asteroids and mines to avoid throughout. Still, the lack of variety is far from the game's biggest issue.
While space shooter fans do not demand much in terms of length, most will find its difficulty too easy to look past. While the screen is almost constantly swarming with enemies, the game puts too much emphasis on the simple one-shot kill types. The screen is typically overloaded with more enemies than you can handle with a load or three of cluster missiles, but everything you see can be easily dispatched with a blast from your pea-shooter of a rail gun. The game is at its best when it mixes in a few of the larger-scale baddies in with the mindless one-shot kill enemies, forcing you to prioritize your fire. Sadly, it does not do this often enough until the final level.
The difficulty fails to scale upwards quickly enough. On the hardest difficulty, experienced gamers will find themselves able to blast their way to level five with their eyes closed. Once at level five, things get a little more challenging; thanks to the mine-dropping reinforcement ships. Still, gamers will grow bored of shooting their way through four bland levels to finally see a decent one, only to die a few times and start the process over.
Despite some power-ups and the slowly increasing frequency of large-scale enemies, the game does little to keep you interested. The challenge never evolves much, not even adding mines that stick to your ship until level seven. There are no boss battles requiring you to defeat a massive enemy, and the mini-boss ships that you encounter never force you into actually defeating the enemy. Live through its taunt-like flybys long enough, and it will simply disappear.
While the game boasts co-op on the same console or over Live, those without friends also purchasing the game or in the same house may want to look elsewhere for their co-op shooter fix. The Live community is nonexistent, with long stretches of time passing without ever finding another player in any of the difficulty levels to blast through it with. When you do finally get a game going, it is truly a shared experience. Players share everything except ship damage. The shared points makes it easy to reach the high score plateaus, but the shared lives make keep it rather difficult to actually beat the game on the hard difficulty.
With just ten levels to blast through, and a non-existent base of Live players, there is little pulling you back to Aces Of The Galaxy once you beat it. There is the old-school challenge of upping your high score, or the five-star rating system to play against, but players demand more replay value for the 800 MS Point price than the game delivers. Those who do beat it will want to stick around for some of the most inventive and entertaining credits sequences XBLA has seen.
Despite its flashy looks, Aces Of The Galaxy falls well short of the crown as XBLA's best shooter, by forgetting that shooter fans care more about a challenge than they do looks. To get fans' attention, the game needed to start the game as difficult as level ten, and ramp up from there. Instead, Aces offers a pretty, but fleeting, gaming experience.
