Xeno Assault 2 Review

I was surprised by this game quite a bit, mainly due to the fact that I had just previously played the despicable Bugatron, a much worse version of the same concept.

First off, sometimes 2D graphics are the best and most-fitting kind; Xeno Assault's devs, Jagged Blade, obviously realized this. The graphics are clear and crisp and efficient, and everything works well together.

Secondly, the controls are as easy and intuitive as they ought to be, being usable for keyboard, mouse, joystick, or any combo. I personally used the mouse to move and use special weapons, and the Spacebar for normal shooting.

Although the actual enemy ships didn't have much variety over the course of the demo mission, they seemed to increase in strength/HP as your progressed, which was nice. However, I did find the "stacking" of special weapons to be both incredibly helpful and incredibly easy. I played the game a total of three times, and the third time I didn't die at all due to the plentiful shield bonuses, as well as the way that the weapons stack into some serious awesome firepower. I am not sure if that's good or bad, but as a casual gamer, I found it to be a breath of relief as compared to rubbish like Bugatron.

The soundtrack was fitting for the game, but on the flipside, it almost made me chuckle at how cliche and cheesy it was. However, this was barely a concern at all considering I was hellbent on blasting enemy ships 99% of the time. If anything, the soundtrack is sort of nostalgic of a time when these games were the only thing we had.

On the downside, for whatever reason, Xeno Assault had a lot of lag at the menu screens and ran very slowly at times. The actual gameplay was nice and fluid, but I found myself cursing the thing at times when I was entering my name into the leaderboard. In fact, the first time I loaded the game up, it froze up before I could even start playing. Why this happened or if it is an isolated incident, I don't know, but it was bothersome. I can run brand new RAM-hog games rather well, and so the bit of lag was shocking to me.

Furthermore, the time the game froze was when I clicked "Instructions", which took me to a Website. I think this game could do better by simply including the instructions in the game itself, instead of redirecting to the Web.

However, overall, Xeno Assault was a very pleasant experience, and I found myself using every last second of the demo in order to try and get a good high score (which I accomplished). This is the sort of game that could be fun on a computer, or even made available on something like XBox Live.