Pretty underwhelming slow paced shooter.
Let's get straight into the presentation side of things. The menu screens are pretty bland and look like they were thrown together at the last minute. You choose your gametype, then you choose what level you want to play at what difficulty and you can bring a friend if you want. Now, the first time you play you will be greeted by a ridiculously long loading time, given the type of game this is. Thankfully the next time you play loading is instantaneous. After the loading is done you are presented with some scrolling text, which is telling you a completely pointless storyline considering this is pretty much an old school shooter and you really just wanna get into blowing stuff up.
Things pickup after this. The in-game presentation is pretty nice, but it's not what you would call XBOX 360 quality, but for a Live Arcade game it's pretty damn good. The actual end-level bosses look a lot better than the rest of the games graphics. The sound in the game is functional but not particularly special in any way. So let's get straight to the gameplay shall we?
The first thing I noticed is that your little dune buggy handles strangely for this type of game. The way the have done this it's like the buggy is handling how a real buggy would handle, that is if you are facing one way and try to go the opposite way the buggy will perform a turn rather than just instantly driving in the desired direction.
Now, it's pretty obvious to me that Assault Heroes is a blatant ripoff of the 1986 Konami game called "Jackyl". The developers have added some new features to that gameplay.
In Assault Heroes you can actually get out of your buggy (in Jackyl you drove a jeep and were stuck in it). When you are out of your jeep the game becomes incredibly lame and not really much fun. You can fire a gun and throw grenades, but your bullets move in a kind of slow motion, it's pretty pathetic actually.
They've added smartbombs, which I believe they refer to as nukes. Pretty devastating stuff indeed, and you start with 3 of them, and you can pick up another just before the very first boss. You can toss grenades from your buggy, but you could do that in Jackyl so that's nothing new.
You do get some new weapons, like a flamethrower and some slow firing but beefy straight firing artillery weapon. I found that the flamethrower works against pretty much everything, even if the loading screen tips tell you it's good against infantry (it's also good against buildings and tanks).
Speaking of weapons, when you attack a structure you will see a little green bar telling you the building's "health" if you like. If you are blowing it away with the mini-gun you will see the bar move very little (as in, nearly not at all). If you toss a grenade the building blows up straight away, the flamethrower does noticeable damage, and the artillery does heavy damage in bursts.
I found the shooting action in Assault Heroes to be a little too slow paced for my liking. You use the second analog stick to aim your gun in any direction, like you do in Robotron or Geometry Wars. I can't see why this control method was chosen because the gameplay was never hectic enough to really need it. I actually felt totally detached from the action, and this game feels like someones XNA project to me, and to be honest I don't think that this game has very good level design.
Assault Heroes seems to be a love it or hate it game in my opinion, and I'm stuck in the middle. It's certainly worth downloading and playing, but I was hoping for something a little more faster paced. As it stands, Assault Heroes is a pretty average shooter, nothing really outstanding, but your opinion will almost certainly very so you should really give it a go and see what you think.