A graphically beautiful and detailed twin stick arcade style shooter that you must buy and will enjoy!
Nano Assault Neo (which will be here on out referred to as Nan) is an amazing and very challenging Arcadedic shooter where if it was actually a real arcade game, the kind that you pay to play a round till you died or ran out of credits, you would end put spending more than just a few pockets and wallets full of cash trying to top the world wide leader boards(currently only America though since the Wii U hasn't launched world wide yet) and trying your absolute hardest to make your score impossible to beat. Which I should mention will not be easy to do considering Nan provides a great challenge to anyone who cares about their standing with the online community. If not, then okay, Nan will be a tad bit easier, but not by much.
What do I mean? Well lets say that you dont care about high scores and you just want to be able to brag with your friends, and on Miiverse under the Nan community, about how you've beaten the game. But now lets say that you do care about high scores and not only do you want to brag about it with your friends and on Miiverse, but you want to brag about how you are Number 1 on all the leader boards? Well, get ready for a massive challenge.
(Continuing with my point in the above paragraph about the challenge of nan) In Nan, there are 4 "cell-clusters" (worlds you could call them I suppose) and each cluster has 4 "cells" (levels). When you start out in the first cluster on the first cell, all you have is your ship, which can shot rapid fire at a decently quick pace. Yeah rapid fire right from the start sounds like it'll allow you to kick these germs/ bug like things/ beautiful yet nasty looking enemies pretty quickly right? Wrong, there is only one enemy in the game that dies pretty quickly when you all you have is your ship's gun. In the first level alone, there are like 3-4 different enemies, and all except the one I just mentioned have ranged attacks. So yeah it sounds difficult now and it is, believe me, but it is also very fun trying to over come the challenge presented in each and every cell. The game doesnt leave you alone out there with only one weapon now, not at all. In every cell, it will be possible to collect upgrades, these upgrades include but are not limited to; satellites (another rapid fire gun for your ship), bombs, a timed force field, and power-ups. Does this make each cell too easy? No, because in order to collect these upgrades and power ups, you have to kill the enemies before they kill you. I should mention now that you only have 3 hearts (they aren'called that but I don't know what to call them) along with 2 lives. Touching an enemy (or they touch you) will cause you to loose one heart (though a few enemies have instant kills attacks). Anyway in order to get even the most basic upgrade, the satellite, you have to kill enemies as they spawn in, drop in, pop out of the ground, come around a curve of the cell, etc, all in an attempt to surround you and over whelm you. Which at times if you don't pay extra close attention to your surroundings, will happen often. It isn't hard to get at least one satellite since after killing at least the first 10% of the enemy population on that cell. Something that I should note is that you can have up to 4 satellites at a time orbiting your ship and you can customize their location and where they will shoot every easily, though I'll talk about that in a bit. Basicly, the more guns you have (up to 5 if you include your ship) the faster you will be able to knock down an enemies health, although it should also be noted that their health will only go down more quickly if multiple guns are shooting and hitting them, if only 1 or 2 guns out of your 5 or 4 guns are hitting them, then it'll take longer for you to kill them and give them a chance to fire at you and or the chance for more enemies to surround you and attack you. Luckily if you are decked out with all 4 satalites, most enemies will die within 1-2 seconds if your shots are accurate. Now as for other power ups, they seem more random drops from the enemies than the satellites but they are truely awarding if get them and very helpful when you get into tight spots. a Power-up such as the force field, is timed (like 10 or 15 seconds), but getting it (it will activate as soon as you get it) will allow you to run guns ablazing into areas of the cell that are teaming with enemies without having to worry about their deadly shots or touch. Other power-ups, of which i dont know their names, will save you when you would other wise die, one such power up is one where if used, will send out an electrical pulse that will insta-kill all enemies within a very limted range around you. Such power-ups like that ones comes with a limited amount of usage, so say you use a power-up 4-5 times, it will run out and you will have to start keeping your wits about you again. Okay, so then its a challenge to collect all 4 satellites and even more so for the other power-ups, but say I get them and become decked out with guns and power-ups, wont I be OP? The short answer to that is no, which only adds to the challenge. Because for one thing, I believe that you can only have one power-up at a time (not including the force field or the 4 guns) and even if you use a power-up such as one of the ones that are insta-kills, since they have a limited range, it is more than likely that you have to get more than just a tad bit too close to an enemy to hit them, which in turn gives them the opportunity to hit you with their touch before you use your power-up or for them to fire a shot at you, since using these power-ups will not stop an already fired shot from hitting you and possibly knocking out one of your lives.
Okay, so thanks to the variety of enemies on each cell I need to keep my wit about me and kill them before they get a chance to hurt and kill me, but what else adds to the challenge?
Well for one, whenever you die, you will respawn on the same spot on the cell, (unless you already lost all your lives, in which you will be taken to the leader boards if you broke your previous record or taken to the main screen if you failed to break any records) but, you will have also lost a single satellite, so if you had 4 satellites you will now only have 3, or if you only had 1 you will now only have your one and only gun on your ship and have lost a significant amount of fire-power. Which I should just say right now, that in the later levels losing a single to all of your satellites will make it way harder to defeat (cleanse) the level (cell). You will also find that not only did you lose one satellite, but you also lost (other than a life) your power-ups. So you will have to be even more cautious and accurate with your shots than ever before. What other challenges are there you ask? well another thing is that only one cell-cluster (world) is unlocked at the start of the game, so the challenge there is to unlock the other 3. Oh I forgot to mention a thing about the Highscores/ leader boards, there are leader boards for every cell-cluster and you dont have to beat the cell-cluster in it's entirety to get onto/ knock someone off the leader boards. All you have to do is kill enemies and each and every enemy you kill will add onto your score which is displayed at the top right hand corner on the tv (or Wii U gamepad depending on if you are playing on tv or off screen) at all times. Which brings forth the next part of the challenge, once you have defeated 90% of all enemies on the cell you will unlock the exit. But if you want to get high up on the leader board you are not going to flea to the exit thinking your job is done and that what you have down along with the time bonus will be enough to put you high up on the leader board. Nope, what you will want to do is kill as many of the remaining enemies (hopefully all of them if you want the best possible score bonus for that cell) within 30 seconds. Why 30 seconds? Well because within 20 seconds after the exit has been opened, the cell will start to self destruct (these explosions will not hurt you, they I think they do slow you down) and at the end of the 30 seconds, if you have not made it to the exit and therefor failed to cleanse the cell, it will explode completely, killing you (I think) and completing the level. In which you will then be scored. Part of the score comes from the score that you got by killing most if not all enemies, then some comes from the time bonus (the sooner you get to the exit once it has opened within those 30 seconds the higher that part of your score will be), and then some is determined by if you have any lives remaining, if you have none then you wont receive extra score for that, and then the rest comes from killing 100% of the enemies. My advice is to ignore the 30 second count down slightly and to just try your best to kill all enemies, although once the count down gets down to 10 seconds, rush like you've never rushed before to get to the exit, because other wise you wont get a time bonus and you'll loose a life I think so there is less bonus score to be added to your over all score. The final bit of the challenge in cell-cluster is the boss! C'mon you cant tell me you honestly didn't expect an arcade style shooter of this caliber not to have bosses? The bosses are, I'm not going to say easy since the opposite is true, less stressful since they are the only enemy on that cell, therefor the only physical and ranged attacks you have to worry about are coming from a single enemy. For them all you have to do is try keeping your lives and killing them, in which once you killed them, you will be scored for killing the boss, and for how many lives you have left, and then that score will be added to your over all score and then it will be put onto the leader boards if you did good enough. And if its your first time playing, it will unlock the next cell-cluster and eventually survival mode, 2-player mode, and a few other things that I dont know about since I havent been able to beat the second cell cluster yet.
Please just scroll to the bottom of this review if you are tired of my tangents and all you want is to see my conclusion, which will be a very short summary of everything that I have said, also in a clearer sense too.
So as you can see, there is all that I talked about, as well as more (such as bonus levels) that can make this arcade styled shooter very challenging but also loads of fun. The last thing I should add to this part about challenge is that thanks to Miiverse and its community for Nan, don't expect your highscore on that leader board (if you can even manage to get onto it once you buy the game) to stay up there for long since I expect thanks to Miiverse, the online Community for Nan will remain active and competitive for a long time.
Now to talk about the graphics and music, if you aren't just skimming through this review, you would of noticed that I called this game beautiful and that I called the enimies beautiful and yet nasty. Well what I mean by that, is that basicly with this game, Shin'en has shown off how beautiful and amazing the graphics can be on the Wii U at launch, I cant even begin to imagine how games will look a year or 2 down the road. But anyway, the graphics of Nan are so amazing that the cells that you're trying to cleanse and the enemies that you are trying to kill, are believable, that if say you were to look at a cell or germ under a powerful microscope, you would swear that you've seen that cell or germ in Nan. Now as for the music, I haven't played through all the levels, but what I've heard so far from the sound track is amazing and fits the game perfectly.
So anyway done with my tangents, here is the overall summary. This game, Nano Assault Neo, is a beautiful looking and amazingly sounding arcade twin stick shooter available on the Nintendo Wii U's eshop at a price that fits it perfectly. The game is fun to play and easy to pick up and play but is very challenging for those wishing to score high in the online community, yet not too challenging where the game crosses the line of extreme fun to being irritating and not fun at all, and is also simple enough where people who just wish to beat the game can after a few tries.
Overal score: 9
-Graphics: 10
-Music: 9
-Controls: 8.5
-gameplay: 9
-Cell (level) designs: 10
-Enemy designs: 10
-*Content; 4 cell-clusters, 4 boses, 16 cells in total: 8.5
-Multiplayer (local): N/A
-Online (no online multiplayer): Good, simply because the leader boards will keep you playing this game to become the best for a long time
-Replay value: 10
*My personal thougths on the amount of levels is that there should of been more, but then again this is an arcade styled game and is a launch title ontop of everything else, so pretty much I hope that more content will be added through reasonably priced, if not free, dlc cell-cluster packs.