The Xbox Live Arcade is a unique creature. Most of the time, it spits out dreck and crud with the frequency of a sewage plant. But on rare occasions, a hidden gem will shine through at just the right time to restore our faith in the service. One such game was the original Assault Heroes, a two-stick shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars. What set it apart was that on top of such simple gameplay, developer Wanako Games provided a unique presentation with the use of multiple vehicles and realized enemies, rather than simple shapes.

The game was such a fun, little experience and so well received that Sierra released a sequel for it a few weeks ago. But does Assault Heroes 2 provide anything new, or is it just more of the same? Keep reading to find out.

Nothing much has changed about the way that Assault Heroes 2 is played. The left analog stick moves your vehicle and the right analog stick shoots whatever weapon you have selected. It’s a simple, yet effective control scheme. If you really start to panic as characters flood the screen, you can pull the triggers to fire either a grenade or a screen-clearing nuke. The controls haven’t changed since the first game, though if memory serves me correctly, the flamethrower was a bit stickier in the original which I feel gave it a bit more control.

There have been a few changes, though, that give the game more variety than its predecessor. Firstly, there is a new ice beam to compliment the flamethrower, stopping infantry and vehicles in their tracks in order to crack them into pieces. In addition, the first game featured bonus underground levels that unforgivingly only gave one chance for completion, but in Assault Heroes 2, these areas have been expanded and can be tried multiple times and, as a result, are much less aggravating this time around. When playing the game on foot, your character can now roll by pressing the A button. Again, this is not a major reform, but definitely makes on-foot sections less frustrating. A final enhancement is the ability to hijack other vehicles such as tanks (lumbering yet powerful) and helicopters (light and floaty).

What really sets Assault Heroes 2 apart from the first iteration is the sense of personality that the game imparts on the player. The first Assault Heroes, while fun, felt generic in its environments and enemies. You had boring forest, water, and metallic fortress levels. Assault Heroes 2 might not be any stronger on story (which is nonexistent), but it exhibits a huge leap in presentation. The bosses are all detailed “mecha” versions of animals, but they and the environments are colorful and detailed. Midway through the first zone, two mecha-elephants made there way past my jeep, followed closely by a smaller baby-mecha-elephant. Soon after, my jeep ran into another mecha-elephant that I had to take down. I won’t lie; I felt guilty doing it.

The sheer amount of chaos on screen has been ramped-up considerably thanks to environments in which nearly every tree, bush, and tower is destructible. Most of the time it feels pretty epic without being excessive, but there would be occasional instances in which I lost sight of where I was within all of the exploding tanks and tribesmen.

If you enjoyed the first one, you have no reason to pass up playing Assault Heroes 2. You’ll enjoy a surprisingly polished presentation and the same dual-stick gameplay. I had a blast, and hopefully, this won’t be the last we see of the series.

4/5