PopCap + Gastronaut = Lurve
Gel: Set & Match Announced
We'll kick off this review train with my all-time favorite XBLA game: Heavy Weapon. Enjoy the review.The premise is simple; the Red Star army is invading your country, and society's only hope is the Atomic Tank. Armed with lasers, turrets, missiles, and a flak cannon, you must fight off hordes of enemies to save the world from Communism.
The controls are easy enough. Left analog stick to move your tank (the tank can only move horizontally), right analog stick to fire. Everything about this game, from the controls to the story, is so beautifully simple that almost anyone can pick it up and instantly start playing.
In between rounds, you can upgrade your tank. There are nineteen levels and eighteen upgrades, so you will have one of everything by the end of the game. The upgrades include missiles (both homing and non-homing), flak cannons, a powerful laser, lightning bolts that hop between enemies, and shield balls that rotate around your tank. There are no switching weapons; once you get something, it is used automatically. You can imagine the amount of destruction you wreak when your weapons are fully upgraded.
The upgrade system works remarkably well. Each weapon can be upgraded three times, though you can choose to remove upgrades in between rounds. There will be many instances when you will find that the enemies in one certain level are giving you trouble, so you take a couple points off of a weapon and put it into your shields. Sometimes the key to beating a level is modifying what you spend your upgrade points on.
We cannot forget your starting weapon, the humble turret gun, however. You don't spend upgrade points to power up the gun. Instead, several times a level, a white helicopter will fly past and drop a minor upgrade. While it can take a beating, excessively firing at this copter will take points away for friendly fire. The minor upgrades you can receive include the following: the gun upgrade, which powers up your gun; the spread shot, which adds an extra gun; the speed upgrade, which slightly increases your speed; and the nukes, which clear the screen of enemies.
At the end of each level, you are faced with a boss. These bosses are very imaginative, excellently animated, and memorable, without a doubt. However, this is where we will give Heavy Weapon its first criticism. After completing the first nine levels, you are basically taken back to square one. All the bosses that you previously defeated have come back to life, and you must kill all of them a second time to reach the final boss. This just comes across as pure laziness on the developer's part, and unfortunately puts a hamper on the overall experience.
While we are talking about the game's bad side, I will go ahead and point this out, too. Although the game's difficulty ramps up quickly, you rarely feel overwhelmed. But the game does occasionally border on completely unfair. For example, there is one type of enemy whose bombs, although big and easy to hit, are heavily armored and will kill you instantly if it hits the ground. This is fine at first, but if you fail to take the plane out fast enough, another one of the same type will emerge from the other side, and you are left with having to deal with two of them. You instantly lose a very valuable life.
Even with these problems, the game is not unplayable by any means. If nothing else, at least the online multiplayer manages to do everything perfectly. It is a four-person cooperative mode, where the object is to fend off the invaders for as long as you can. You don't have lives; instead, each time you die, it takes a little bit longer to respawn. You won't notice it much at first, but it could decide the fate of the game later on. The game ends when everybody is dead at the same time. You will find yourself coming back to the online mode very often, even though you can only find one or two open games at any given time.
There is so much I can say about this game, about the level design, (never the same level twice!) about the artwork, (even the nukes look very nice) about everything. But it all boils down to this: Heavy Weapon: Atomic Tank is an extremely fun arcade game that currently reigns as my favorite game available from the XBLA. I would highly recommend this game to anyone, and as such, I give it a 4 out of 5.
