Ion Assault Review (PC)

Ion Assault is a pretty cool game. The controls on the Xbox 360 were pretty good and I felt overall it was more suited to that platform.

Since we did a review of the title on that platform this one is going to be quite short.

I find it extremely odd that you would take a game out of its natural environment and put it onto a PC and NOT allow for gamepad play. I thought Steam had this built into its Steamworks. So either the Ion Assault team didn’t use Steamworks or simply forgot that the game needs two sticks to play properly. But when they did the game went from completely unplayable to some serious good fun.

Why? Because it sucks playing the game with the W, A, S, D keys. I have an Xbox controller normally on hand at my desk, and it makes sense to play the game with that.

So what makes this different from the Xbox version besides the controls? Well, the graphics are a tad nicer. Since the game can take advantage of the more powerful PC hardware and graphics cards. It certainly does look nice, whether in windowed of full screen mode.

I was ready to pummel this game with a rating of unplayable until the gamepad support was introduced. It’s part of the reason this review is so late after launch also.

The game gives you a couple ways to play:

• Campaign - A level-by-level approach with bosses at the end of each area.
• Survival - Just that, survive as long as you can.

There’s no multiplayer in the game at all and there are only four areas to play through in campaign mode. It could be rather short if you were determined to sit down and play it through. The addition of leaderboards does little to make for any sort of replay value and while the game is interesting, it could be far more. The omission of co-op (which is available in the XBLA version) seems short-sighted to me

Overall the game is a decent two-stick shooter and the having to take in particles and use them as ammunition is cool. It also gave them reason to make some pretty good-looking particles because what would be the point if they didn’t look cool on the PC.

To read more about the game see the GDN XBLA version review.