by: Michael Barnes

Nano Assault is the 3DS debut for developers Shin’en, who graced the DS with a couple of that platform’s only 2D shooter options. The Nanostray games were pretty decent, but they were workmanlike and rather bland from their visual design to gameplay elements to their soundtracks. Unfortunately, Nano Assault carries on this tradition of dullness despite being, again, a pretty decent and competently put together game that also happens to look really damn good in 3D. Other than a couple of well-implemented borrowed ideas, you’d be hard pressed to identify anything that makes this game stand out in a crowd.

But if you’ve ever thought that combining a twin-stick shooter, Star Fox 3D, and Super Mario Galaxy was a great idea, then Nano Assault may very well tick off a couple of boxes for you. The game offers a “story mode”, but there really isn’t any kind of narrative other than that you pilot a Nano-sized ship and you’re tasked with blowing up a bunch of spiky, blobby, and wormy things to stop the dreaded Nanostray virus at a cellular level. Yep. Kind of a Fantastic Voyage kind of thing, I suppose. Beat the 32 story levels- which include several boss encounters with larger spiky, blobby, and wormy things and you can play the levels over again in a high score arcade mode or a Boss Rush. There’s a Nano Shop where you can spend your Nano coins earned in the game to buy Nanopedia entries. Again- yep.

The gameplay is good, and the concept of wrapping a twin-stick shooter around a fully three dimensional Super Mario Galaxy planetoid-like cell structure is actually pretty clever, even if it doesn’t dramatically alter the gameplay this particular genre has offered since Robotron 2084. The game takes more than the 3D element from Mario’s space adventures though. Each of the core levels requires you track down a couple of missing DNA strands (not unlike finding stars) and there are even “coins” that give you an extra life when you grab 100 of them.

It looks great, and the dimensionality is really cool. The action is pretty hot, and it can be pretty challenging with an old school one-hit-and-you’re-dead rule. Hunting the DNA strands is kind of fun, and the ability to adjust the spread of your three-way primary cannon lets you change things up a bit for crowd control or focused damage.

What’s not so good is that the 3DS isn’t a twin-stick platform (yet), so the shooting is handled by the four face buttons. It feels awkward, particularly when there’s a perfectly good touchscreen going unused that works well in lieu of a second stick as mobile device shooters have demonstrated. Difficulty can also be an issue because it doesn’t occur at a design level, regardless of the developer’s claims that it adjusts to suit the player. I died more times that I care to recount because I simply couldn’t see enemy bullets due to my own fire, explosions, lens flares, or other on-screen elements. Sometimes, the ship’s hitbox seemed to be inconsistent. These are big shooter no-nos.

I’m also not convinced by the airborne sequences, which come across like a cheapjack Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon imitation. They’re rudimentary and full of accidental crashes because it’s sometimes not clear where your safe pathways are. And again, death by random bullet seems to happen too often. They usually culminate in a boring boss battle that involves flying around a nondescript organism and shooting at its glowing parts through a couple of stages until it blows up. But sure, the “comin’ at ya” 3D of these sequences looks really good- maybe even better than Nintendo’s recent Star Fox reissue- so at least they’re palatable.

Nano Assault is shallow, pretty, kind of fun but repetitive. It’s the kind of game that I tend to play intensely for a couple of days and then put away, never to touch it again. It’s a decent game and it’s definitely made, but you’d be hard pressed to identify anything that it excels at or that marks it as anything other than a fairly disposable title. As with many of the 3DS’ titles to date, it’s also in direct competition with literally hundreds of iOS and Android games in this particular genre that are excellent, offer depth or greater incentive for replay, and have unique differentiators beyond the 3D graphics. And, unavoidably, some of those better games are a dollar.

There’s also a distinct lack of both depth and variety, despite the developer’s claims that the difficulty adjusts according to player skill. There are just a couple of weapons available and the enemy types are repetitive. There are only so many spiky, blobby, wormy things you can shoot before it gets kind of old.