Ion Assault

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 b...

[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 ...

An asteroid shooter where you vacuum particles out of the playing field and then shoot them around. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=386179456 This means that you have to keep moving to get enough particles, and aimed shot and deliberation are often more important than just shooting everywhere. Visually quite appealing. The shot particles bounce off asteroids and arena walls in waves and sometimes leave nice refraction patterns. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=386316284 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...

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 wa...

Pretty graphics, mediocre gameplay. It's a side scrolling shooter in a box. It forces you to move around to build up ammo. Too many sparkly bits to know what's going on. Pixels flying everywhere then you die.

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), ...

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,

Disappointing Asteroids style shooter. Despite the impressive particle show, the shooting just seems to lack punch and excitement. Geometry Wars was an additictive Asteroids clone that nailed that sense of blasting enemies to bits through great use of audio & visual feedback to the player, but Ion Assault fails to delivery shooting that clicks in the same way. And when core gameplay lacks that essential fun factor, it doesn't take long for things to get boring. I also found the amount of stuff flying around on-screen a bit over the top - especially the survival mode - making death by collision a frequent occurrence. It would make a good screensaver, I guess...

This game sucks, i payed very cheap (0.99) but still it's awful. Unless i could get some money with the SteamCroms. Don't buy it, this game was a waste of time.

Shiny, but disappointing. This game is really nice to look at, but the gameplay is just not there. It feels like Asteroids confined to a tiny box. There was very little sense of urgency, and the controls were awkward. If you're interested in shooters with good particles, I recommend Shatter or Beat Hazard instead.