Aegis Wing Review

Rating: 7




When the aliens invade and it's left up to an elite fighter pilot force to save the planet, the North Americans will be the best suited for the job, thanks to Aegis Wing. Aegis Wing is a new Gradius style side-scrolling space shooter, available for free on XBox Live Arcade, but only to subscribers in North America.

The game doesn't take any bold new steps with the genre, but Aegis Wing is none the less a solid offering, especially considering it was created in roughly 3 months by a group of three summer interns at Microsoft.

Aegis Wing is the brain child of Scott Brodie, Danny Dyer and Matt Monson. The three interns did all the development work, while art and audio were taken care of for them. Developer Carbonated Games then finished it up and got it ready for Xbox Live Arcade. It is being offered on XBox Live as free download for a "limited time," though who knows what that means.

The game plays like your typical side scrolling space shooter. You control a ship flying through space, despite the vastness of space always going from left to right, blowing up enemy ships while dodging their return fire. Along the way you will pick up an assortment of power-ups; heat seeking missiles, a force field that bounces back enemy fire, an EMP burst that disables enemy ships and stops incoming fire, and an laser beam that destroys any targets in front of you.

The reason for all this fighting and blowing things up? They’re aliens, that’s what you do to aliens, duh. For those interested in the story, the year is 2015 and Humanity is fleeing a dying Earth. They flee to the world Europa, but are soon attacked by an alien race, the Araxians, who also want the planet. You are a pilot flying an experimental starfighter made from stolen Araxian technology, and you are humanity’s last hope. Pretty standard stuff, everyone has been humanity’s last hope at least a few times.

There are six missions in the game, taking roughly four or five minutes each to complete, except for the final mission which is about twice as long. Most of the missions end with a boss fight, which pits you against a large Araxian spaceship. The bosses are rather uninspired, looking pretty much identical except for the final boss who only looks slightly different. None of the bosses are especially challenging, once you discover their “boss pattern” it’s easy to avoid their fire and return it in kind.

Aegis Wing is for 1 to 4 players, either locally through a single 360 or over Xbox Live. One of the interesting features of the multiplayer is that players can link up, attaching their ships to one another. Regardless of how many ships are attached, one player flies the combined ship, while the other players act as a 360 degree turret. Forming together like this also makes any weapon power-ups you pick up much more powerful.

The game can easily be played through solo on the normal setting, but on Insane multiplayer is a necessity. Insane throws a ridiculous increase in enemy ships at you, which obviously leaves you with a lot more bullets to dodge. The extra firepower of other players is needed to clear enemies as quickly as possible before there are so many alien lasers flying through space that they become impossible to dodge, especially considering on the Insane difficulty you only get one life.

The background art in the game is stunning, and gives a really good impression of depth, with debris floating far off in the distance and up close. They do a bit too good of a job with the sense of depth, because the objects floating close to you seem like they should be something that needs to be steered around, when actually they are just in the background. This can get very disorienting as you’re trying to dodge hundreds of bullets, shooting back, and then suddenly “oh I have to dodge that giant rock, oh wait, its just background.” More than a few times this led me to dodge the background only to fly straight into a bullet, or one of the small red meteors that actually are something you have to dodge. The ship models on the other hand, aren’t quite as stunning. They are the typical polygonal spaceships that are common of the genre.

The orchestral score for the game is much more than you would expect from this kind of title. The light tones of the main menu and screens between missions versus the deep, heavy tones of the mission music is very reminiscent of the contrast between the Empire’s and Rebel Alliance’s themes of Star Wars.

Aegis Wing doesn’t do anything especially new, but it’s got decent visuals, great music, and gameplay that won’t disappoint if you’re a fan of this style of game. It may be a little short, but it's still a fun little game, and it’s really hard to go wrong with a free download that asks no more commitment from you than having 46mb free on your hard drive.