Ion Assault Reviews

I really enjoy this a new twist on the old school space shooter games. I would definitely recommend it but make sure your comp meets the minimum specs because the graphics take up alot of memory it seems. Totally worth giving it a shot in my oppinion,

This game is an okay way to waste a few hours, if you are willing to put up with dodgy targeting, weird hitboxing, and the greatest plague of Asteroids type games: NOT BEING ABLE TO SEE WHERE YOU ARE HALF THE TIME. The most often way my ship got exploded was when I could NOT see where I was, and I couldn't see the enemy that killed me or where the shot came from that killed me. Or an enemy appeared from the edge of the screen with too little time to react. It also feels like a tech demo for particle effect. It's not bad, but it's not perfect.

The particles are the only thing going for this game, but between a short and uninteresting campaign with no story and little variety, the core gameplay being hampered by the gimmick, and technical issues on Win11, I can't recommend it. The campaign is 4 sequences which each consist of five levels and a boss. Levels are literal squares where you basically play asteroids and shoot enemies to try and stay alive. There are a finite amount of objects per level and the core shooting is a charge mechanic so it's not very frequent and punishes mistakes. The boss fights were the highlight, but I had more than 10 freezes in my 1.7h playtime. This could be because I'm using a 13th gen CPU and the game isn't optimized for it, but I haven't had issues in any other games... The trailer basically gives you the same amount of enjoyment you will receive from actually playing the game. Neat gimmick, but there's not much of a game attached to it.

One day, during the times of truly crazy Steam sales, I bought no less than 20 games for less than $80, and I just so happened to grab this one for $2.50 as part of that purchase. Of course, I then proceeded to completely forget about it and not play it, until stumbling across it in my library once again over a decade later. So, has this game aged well? Honestly, no, not at all. It tries to make a unique spin on the twin-stick shooter formula by making it so your ship has no weapon at all by default. You need to absorb ions from the clouds floating around the rather annoyingly cramped arenas and then launch it out again to attack enemies. If this sounds kinda awkward and not fun, well, you'd be exactly right, quite frankly. It has two control schemes- keyboard+mouse (KB+M) and gamepad, and honestly neither one feels particularly good. Constantly holding down the left mouse button with KB+M gets rather tiresome fast. This frustration definitely applies to needing to hold the left shoulder trigger constantly while using a gamepad as well. The game also has pretty mediocre gamepad support, forcing you to use KB+M in menus and then it only works during gameplay. It also does a bad job explaining the controls in both the tutorial and the nigh-useless "config" page. Yes, it's one of THOSE games, developed in that annoying early 2010s era that basically just EXPECTED you'd use an Xbox 360 controller on PC with whatever bad/good default configuration they give you, and no convenient way to remap anything. Granted, this game did come out in 2011, more than 3 years before the PS4 would start to help loosen Microsoft's dominance on the PC game controller market, but still, other controllers existed back then, too! Moving to the gameplay itself, "irritating" and "underwhelming" probably describe it best for me. Everything stems from the janky controls I've spent entirely too much time ranting about already, and the shot you fire after gathering plasma has ZERO spread to it. If your shots don't hit enemies directly HEAD ON, a task far easier said than done, thanks to the controls, they'll most likely just glide right past your intended targets harmlessly. The game does have power-ups and some interesting scoring mechanics on its surface. Unfortunately, neither of these do much in particular to offset the annoying gameplay and aggravating controls. The power-ups seem exciting but more often than not, they don't seem to really do anything? Plasma Torus forms a ring of plasma around you that seems like it should ostensibly kill enemies and blow up asteroids, but in practice, it seems to just... gently caress(?) them while doing little to no damage, apparently. Meanwhile, the Seeking Drone item seems decently useful, but that one appears quite rarely. Not much worth noting about the graphics and sound. With all the particles flying everywhere all the time, I found it difficult to keep track of my ship, a considerable flaw for a twin-stick shooter. They look alright for a budget title from this time period. I do not remember anything about the music except finding it repetitive and annoying while playing. In all honesty, I'd have a hard time recommending this game for $2.50, let alone its full price of $10, even when it originally released in 2011. Now? Nope, no way. Not unless you get it for free, honestly.

Interesting game idea that feels like it was built from a particle tech demo, but unfortunately crashes often enough I couldn't play more than 10 minutes.

It is a supremely good arcade style game with utterly simple controls. If it was released in the 1980's it would have been a golden classic.

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.

It's visually insane, which would be fine if the shit that killed you wasn't impossible to see. The particles are pretty and everything, but the gameplay suffers as a result. For this game to really be playable, you'd have to either reduce the vibrancy of the ions, which would probably kill the aesthetic, or come up with some creative way to make dangerous things stand out from the background of moving particles. If the projectiles and enemy ships interacted more with the particles, it might be easier to deal with. Finding wakes would allow you to judge threats inside the cloud. As it is right now, it's just too hard to see, and I don't think that should ever be a factor in the difficulty of a game. The achievements are kind of shitty, by the way. The 500k points in survival was really hard for me to get--I can't imagine getting some of these score achievements. There's evidence that more than half of the people that have them cheated (i.e., with the steam achievement program thing), since the ingame leaderboards and the percentage of players who have them don't match up. A few of the people who show up on the leaderboards may also have cheated, since their scores are insanely high (1.9 billion, as an example). I don't know. I don't consider myself a whore for achievements, but I do consider them part of a game. When they're chosen arbitrarily or carelessly, they can easily become impractical or flat-out intractable. That makes the achievements unfit for purpose, which makes the game much less attractive to me. It would be a better game if there were no achievements and just in-game leaderboards.

[h1]81 / 100[/h1] Neat Asteriods clone updated for the 21st century with intense close combat & relentless [i]'bullet hell'[/i] 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 [i](honestly its pretty short)[/i], 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 [i](there is some minimal scrolling)[/i], 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 [i](works in-game not in menus!)[/i], but besides some limited content & the controller menu support this is a cool & rather unique little shoot 'em up. [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TrueBlueReviews#curation]If you enjoyed reading this review, please follow [u]True Blue Reviews[/u] for more recommendations![/url]

Pretty Asteroids-type shooter with lovely particle effects and graphics. Sadly, the novelty of the particle effects soon wears very thin and each stage becomes a chore of gathering particles and killing asteroids - not very challenging or deep at all. The add-on weapons, such as seeking drones or mines add very little variety to your shooting arsenal and are nowhere near as powerful as a full ion blast, so you end up just sticking to hoovering up particles and shooting them at rocks and enemies. To make things worse, the music is terrible. I mean, just terrible. Each sector (consisting of 6 levels each) has its own music, which consists of the same 30 seconds looped over and over again. Its not bad enough the gameplay is so awfully repetitive, the music makes things worse by adding to the monotony. Get this if it comes with a Humble Bundle, or you REALLY want a shooter for a buck or so, but you probably wont get much more than 30-60m gametime out of this before you hit the unistall button. The Good: - Decent Boss fights - Lovely particle graphics The Bad: - Extremely repetitive gameplay - Extremely monotonous music