Just when you thought the Xbox Live Arcade couldn't offer anything truly great, along comes Assault Heroes...
So the story of Assault Heroes is pretty much along the lines of, you're some guy in a jeep who must venture throughout an island filled with people that need to die. That's pretty much it in terms of story, but it's not like it's a major part of the game, nor is it for most arcade games.
Assault Heroes will remind most of simple top-down shooters. You move your jeep and hold your analog stick in the direction that you want to shoot. You will also come along quite a few upgrades and new weapons that keep the game pretty engaging, but the problem is, is that there aren't too many weapons to upgrade. But what Assault Heroes does better than any other game that it's similar to is the fact that you get more freedom and can hop off your jeep and go on foot if you wish. There are also small segments where you enter an interior space and you'll have to hop out on foot and deal with the baddies without your vehicles. Speaking of baddies, the game dishes out a lot of them at players very quickly and all of them are pretty cool and it's fun to get used to the strategies needed to take each one down, whether it be suicide bombers that need to be taken down from a distance or giant robots that really can be harmed by anything except your rocket launcher or grenades.
The game has the same basic level design that you'd see in any old-school game. You fight through waves of bad guys and fight a boss at the end of each stage and there's rarely a change in level design, which can be pretty disappointing. The boss battles will be pretty fun at first but then you can grow to realize that each boss battle is very similar in terms of weak-points and strategies needed to take the boss down.
The game also has local and online co-op which is pretty fun and definately worth checking out.
The game's graphics are fairly good. It has a cool futuristic, robotic art-style to it and has a few good bump-maps and some pretty awesome lighting effects and models. The flaws in the graphics are the graphical effects that can look pretty lame and the animations aren't done too well at all.
Assault Heroes has okay sound quality. Some sound effects sound great, others sound horrible and are simply annoying (such as the constant strange yells that the bombers make or repeated shooting sounds.) The music is also for the most part pretty good, but can also get mixed in terms of quality.
Assault Heroes' singleplayer should last the average person about 3-4 hours and the game is well worth another play-through on co-op and also has many opportunities to dive back into the single or multiplayer for more Achievements, for the people out there who actually care about their GamerScore.
Assault Heroes is a very enjoyable game, especially amongst the sea of low quality titles constantly hitting the Xbox Live Arcade. With great single and mutliplayer modes, and for the most part good production values, Assault Heroes is the best XBLA game out there.