Aces of the Galaxy

Added July 15th, 2008 by Artie Augustyn

Aces of the Galaxy is a classic space shooter reminiscent of the popular “Star Fox” series. The game tries to implement a heavy replay factor into this tried and true formula, but because of a variety of minor flaws and annoyances, it fails to be entertaining long enough to experience the extra content added. However if you can look past these petty problems, there’s still some decent ship destroying to be done.

In Aces you play as a no-name human hero who has stolen a prototype spaceship from an alien race called the Skurgians. Your objective is to successfully deliver the stolen ship back to the planet earth. But as arcade shooters usually go, the story is hardly a factor in your enjoyment of the game. The star of this game is the shooting combat. It’s fairly simplistic in design. You have a machine gun, a missile launcher, and a multi-gun that can lock onto multiple enemies and destroy them all at once. These weapons serve as your offensive strategy, but should you ever need to evade incoming fire, you have the ability to barrel roll out of the way. The shooting mechanics work great, and obliterating hundreds of foes never ceases to give you a smile on your face.

You’ll have to blast your way through nine levels before you complete the task you’re given in Aces, and along the way you’ll come into contact with a multiplicity of different environments and foes. The first level will always be the same, but should you pick up a certain power-up found within any of the levels, you unlock the ability to change your course. Even though Aces requires you to complete nine levels, there’s really twenty five in total. As long as you obtain the power-up, at the end of the level you’ll be prompted with a decision to choose which path to take next. There are three variations, but in reality all of the levels are identical. One has an ice backdrop, one has a fire backdrop, and one just looks like “space.” There’s no exclusive type of enemy or challenge to any of the environments, so the choice you make, doesn’t really make a difference, you’ll still be shooting aliens no matter which way you go. So the “choice” factor ends up being one-dimensional.

The graphics of the game add a lot of enjoyment to the game. For an Xbox Live Arcade game, Aces looks incredible. You’ll see planets looming in the background, ships exploding into a hundred pieces accompanied by a glamorous fireball, and various other graphical nuances that successfully make the game visually aesthetic. But the constant explosions and effects get in the way more than you would like. Enemy gunfire has a tendency to blend in with background flourishes, making it difficult to decipher what to dodge, and what to ignore. The enemies themselves also do this quite a bit, forcing you to change your tactics from skillfully choosing your targets and dodging attacks, to just spastically firing off random shots while moving around in a sporadic fashion. You never really get a sense of what exactly is going on on-screen. The game includes a cheap copout for this problem by giving you the ability to slowdown time, providing a few seconds to think, but the action remains indecipherable no matter how much time you’re given to decrypt it.

Along with these jarring issues, the gameplay eventually becomes exceedingly tiresome, and the lack of variety in enemies and environments doesn’t help its case. Even the “bosses” of the game are identical to any other foe you face, the only difference being a shift in background music to tell the player “Hey, this is a boss” without that shift though, you would’ve never known you had just fought a boss. On top of all that it only takes thirty minutes to an hour to beat the game. Unless you’re a huge fan of on-rail space shooters, and also enjoy being a completionist then you’ll be disappointed with the lack of content in Aces of the Galaxy. I would like the mention that the game has the most spectacular end credits in a game, but that doesn’t warrant a purchase.