Okay, so I came home on Friday with my new copy of ODST that I snagged off Craigslist on the cheap. But I decided I would go ahead andcheck out Ion Assault first. Because I knew I would be totally engrossed in ODST for the whole weekend, and would probably not touch anything else for awhile.

I didn’t touch ODST until 11:00 Friday night.

That’s how addicting and cool Ion Assault is.  I played the solo missions for about 2 hours until some friends showed up, and then we played the co-op campaign for about another 2 hours after that.

The physics engine in this game is nothing short of astounding. I’m seriously surprised at how good it is, especially being an arcade game. The graphics are stellar. They are so good, in fact, that they actually distract my ADHD brain to a fault.

“OOOHHHH, Look at the pretty colors!”

*ZAP*

“AWW, dang…”

The gameplay is totally addicting. The basic premise is a lot like Asteroids. There are multiple ”Systems”, each System consists of five levels. The fifth level is the boss level. Beat that, and you move on to the next System. It’s pretty simple.

The one thing that really makes Ion Assault different though, is that the levels have four walls. You can’t simply fly out the right side of the screen and appear on the left side. If you hit the walls, you bounce off. You can use this to your advantage though, as when you discharge your ion blasts, you can recover a portion of the ions that are reflected back off the boundaries. This is also what generates some of the beautiful graphics in the game, as the ions get swirling around pretty violently. It’s really cool.

You gather up the ions, using your ship’s gravity drive. The gravity drive converts the gathered ions into shields to protect your ship, and the rest into a concentrated blast that you use to demolish the floating asteroids and space debris. You have to be careful though, because when you discharge the blaster to demolish something, it also depletes your shield level. Enemies appear in the 2nd level of each system, and hunt you. The next few levels feature floating mines that will sense your Gravity Drive and fly towards you and kill you. There are some other nifty ships that appear, and some enemies and asteroids provide you with various powerups when destroyed. The goal is to destroy all the asteroids and debris, then you enter a warp to the next level of the system.

You can play the campaign both solo, and co-op over live or locally. And there is a point based multiplayer battle mode as well. There really isn’t a story to speak of at all, but whatever, it’s an arcade game. Once you start playing, you won’t care about anything else for a few hours at least.

This game is a must buy, if you are a fan of the genre. My friend Tony put it best, “It’s like a fusion of Biology Battle and Asteroids”, except much, much better. This is by far, one of the best XBL Arcade games this year. Right up there in the top 5 with Shadow Complex, Castle Crashers, and whatever else you can think of. Not the same types of games, but as far as bang for the buck, you can’t beat Ion Assault for value and re-playability.  It is available on XBLA now for 800 Microsoft Points, and well worth the price. Ion Assault scores big on all areas for me. Five Stars, hands down.