Nano Assault EX.
I have to be honest guys, I was a little disappointed with this game. I wrote this whole diatribe and then realised no body is going to read it because it's far too long. I have, therefore, gone back in and added some spiffing headers so you can skip to the parts that interest you (which, given my inability to convey the simplest of concepts concisely, I suspect you'll just want to skip to the end and be done with it).
'Uh-Oh'
My first 'uh-oh' moment was when I realised just how slow the game is. Your ship, the enemies, the speed of projectiles, for a shooter everything just felt a little too sluggish (especially when contrasted with the music which can be hyper-energetic). Enemies passively float towards you, turret like enemies take what feels like forever to do one full rotation, and your ship just propels itself forward at...let's say a leisurely pace.
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with having a slower pace in a shooter, it's just not to my tastes necessarily.
I still enjoyed exploring the level's little planetoids, however, and liked finding all the little DNA strands.
A false sense of direction
Another gripe I have with the game is the map system. On one level I spent 5 - 10 minutes trying to get from one area to another and was constantly getting turned around (which is easy to do on spherical surfaces that curve back around on themselves) before I realised that the little ship icon on the map is not actually representative of which direction your ship is facing. It's not a huge problem, but why even have an avatar of the ship on the map at all if it's not actually representative of the direction you are facing? Just make it a dot or something instead.
...moving on.
It's so 3D that it punched through the space/time continuum and created a duplicate of itself...or is that just ghosting?
The game does look very pretty in spots, but I also found there to be entirely too much 'ghosting'. I would have loved to play this all the way through in 3D, but the ghosting (seeing two of everything) was so bad and the frame-rate took such a hit that I mostly played with the slider off (except those levels which scrolled forward, those looked great in 3D).
PixPix complains about controls...again.
I don't own a Circle Pad Pro and had suspected that the default control scheme would be where the game let me down. I'm happy to report that in those levels that make up the majority of the game, i.e. those which involve destroying all the enemies on a given planetoid, the controls were up to the task. The Circle Pad moves the ship, the face buttons allow you to shoot in up to 8 directions, and between those two inputs you can almost always find an angle from which to shoot enemies safely.
Then we come to perhaps my biggest disappointment with the game, which is that the control scheme does not fair as well in those levels which are on-rails and scrolling forward. The Circle Pad still moves the ship, but now it also moves the reticule, and sometimes even the angle of the camera. It really didn't work for me. Moving the Circle Pad just a little will move the reticule but it will also gradually drift the ship in the same direction. This becomes a particular problem when you want to move your ship one way to avoid enemy fire, but remain on target with the reticule.
There is of course another very famous series which opted to do scrolling shooter levels in the this way, and did so very successfully. That's right, Star Fox. The difference, however, is that the Arwing was generally more maneuverable and had the infamous Barrel Roll (which was in fact an Aileron Roll) to get you out of the way of enemy fire when things got hairy. The Ship in Nano Assault is both more sluggish and does not have any other means of avoiding fire beyond moving out of the way. The result is that, particularly in boss battles, you'll have to spend quite a lot of your time not pointed at things you want to be shooting at.
Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with tying the reticule to the movement of the ship. I love games like Star Fox and After Burner, both of which have a similar set-up, but the difference is that they do it much better.
A value proposition
My last complaint (given all my criticisms you probably think I hated the game, but I don't) is that this game was really short (according to my 3DS activity log it took me 4 hours). I paid £12 for this on eShop and I do question whether or not the amount of content justifies the price (I feel bad for people who probably paid even more at retail when this was released in NA). Especially when compared to games like Fluidity, Fallblox and Mutant Mudds, Nano Assault perhaps isn't the best value proposition. Hell, I spent more time with Mighty Switch Force (6 hours) than I did with Nano Assault.
Admittedly, the game also has other modes (Boss Rush, Arcade Mode, etc) but as far as I can tell these simply reuse the content from the Story Mode, which I'm not exactly eager to dive back in to.
Conclusion
Overall I thought Nano Assault was a decent game, with some good boss battles and a great look, but there are games out there that do everything Nano Assault does and they do it better. Nano Assault just doesn't offer what it is that I come to shooters for. I like 'em fast and I like to be constantly shooting at stuff and seeing things blow up every few seconds (think Sin & Punishment, Lords of Thunder, Geometry Wars, After Burner Climax, UN Squadron etc). Nano Assault, like the ship in the game, is just too reserved for it's own good.
Topic: What is your most recent gaming purchase? (Read 760008 times)
