Ikaroids is a real-time space combat game it shares elements from games such as asteroids and Sinistar.
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The first thing you are presented with is the title screen with a pretty cool picture of an eclipsed sun. When you get to the menu you are presented with 5 options; campaign, co-op campaign, survival and co-op survival. The survival mode is pretty much what you expect, choose from a selection of stages and stay alive as long as you can.
Once you’ve started a new campaign mode, named it and chosen from rookie, veteran or Chuck Norris difficulty, you can select from a choice of four different ships. You are given a selection of 2 missions out of a total of 23, the first mission basic training is just the tutorial level, but worth a play on your first time through the game, following the tutorial the missions start.
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The goal is to destroy waves of enemy ships until you have destroyed enough to go onto the next level, on the stages you will generally start off with someone talking to you at the top such as your superior officer telling you your objectives and going through the story narrative. The gameplay is quite simple, you move with the left analogue stick and shoot with the right analogue stick, push the stick in to fire the secondary weapon.
Asteroids will start spawning, destroying them will reward you with power-ups, afterwards enemies start appearing. There’s generally 4 types of enemies; small fast ships, slightly larger tougher ships but slower, mother ships and boss’s (not using game terminology).
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The first waves are usually just the smaller ships followed by smaller and larger ships then nearer the end you’ll get the mother ships. On the 3rd level of each location you’ll usually encounter a boss at the end of the stages, some are just really big ships firing lots of bullets at you, while others are giant alien monsters that pick up asteroids and fling them at you, really quite cool actually!
Each ship has a selection of 2 primary weapon modes and 2 secondary weapons. I personally prefer the bomb weapons you get on the Hohlaraja and Santus Rho ships are if you are in a bind surrounded by ships you can easily destroy a lot of the weaker ships in one go.
There is not really much to criticize with this game, the gameplay is solid, I did not run into any bugs, the graphics are good and the audio works perfectly. There’s also a whole host of various enemy types and space anomaly’s with nice physics effects, the only thing I could really criticize is that the boss’s seem too easy, I played it through on normal difficulty and the bosses died too easily for my liking.
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The only thing thing that I found annoying was if you got logged out of Xbox Live while playing you are sent right back to the menu screen and unable to play the game unless connected. This rather annoyed me considering I have quite a bad connection, most Indy games you can still play once you’ve loaded, but at least your progress is saved.
Ikaroids costs 240 :MSPoints: which I think is definitely worth the price, if not under-priced, there are far less worthy titles priced higher! You can find out more information as well as download the trial or full versions on the Marketplace.
Review by CyberAxe.
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