Although I am ashamed to admit that my place in the leaderboards is… shall we say, uninspiring; I still had a blast topping my own records and playing for points. Something about the game’s design fueled that old-school instinct in me, so much so that I forgave the annoyingly oriented right stick.

This is the game’s biggest and most glaring flaw: the shooting controls feel unintuitive and certainly slowed me down the first dozen or so times I played. Instead of corresponding directly to the direction onscreen, the stick is mapped in such a way that it feels like an old-school paddle: you feel as if you’re turning a dial instead of directly pointing your gun. On a crazy, chaotic screen, you want your aim to be true, and this scheme really wasn’t cutting it for me.

If you can forgive the control weirdness – which, in fairness, only took a few tries to get used to – then Ion Assault is a very solid bet. It offers a relatively fresh take on a well-established genre, with polished graphics and all the asteroid-blasting pleasure you can find this side of 1979.

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