Players: 1-4
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Microsoft Game Studios / Carbonated Games
Genre: Action
Review By: Ryan Letourneau

“Stinks of formula.”

Why are you even reading this review? With a whopping price tag of 0 points, Aegis Wing is the best value on Xbox Live, at least now that Texas Hold’Em costs money. Rather than wasting your time reading what I have to say, you could be downloading the game and judging it yourself in less time than it’s going to take you to finish this review. Need any more encouragement? There is absolutely no reason not to download Aegis Wing. As far as I know, it won’t corrupt your hard drive and it won’t cause your Xbox 360 to go HAL 9000 on you. You might even have a good time with it – I did!

…at least for a while. Aegis Wing is exactly what you would expect from a free game made by interns. It’s serviceable, for sure. If it wasn’t it never would have made it to the marketplace. But it stinks of formula and its main gimmick, the ability to ‘link up’ your individual ships, squanders promise and ends up contributing heavily to the game’s overall boredom inducement after repeated plays.

If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s a side-scrolling space shooter in the vein of R-Type. The story goes that in 2105, humanity fled Earth for the planet Europa. Soon after arriving, Europa is threatened by an advanced alien race known as the Araxia. Your job is to use stolen Araxia ships (the Aegis Wings) to crush the Araxian threat. Although this might sound grandiose, the story is just told through little blurbs of text under the in-game lobby before each of the six levels and really has no effect on the game itself.

The gameplay itself is standard space-shooter fare. You use tiny red bullets to shoot down wave after wave of Araxian ship, which start out as simple ships that fly in predictable patterns but by the end include big vessels that fire destructive laser beams, as well as small ships that home into you and free-flying crafts that rotate and shoot. Along the way you can pick up weapons like EMP pulses, homing missiles, and protective shields which make the game a lot easier. The game’s six levels are reasonably different graphically, offering beautiful 3D backgrounds, but feel monotonous in terms of gameplay. You see, although the ability to couple with other ships to increase the power of your weapons seems like an interesting idea, it ends up making the game more boring for everyone. Don’t get any ideas about becoming Voltron or Megazord when four people link up. When two people link up, the one who presses the button to link attaches to the other person’s ship, losing the ability to drive but gaining the ability to shoot in 360 degrees. When three people link up? Two shooters, one driver. When four people link up? Three shooters, one driver. Within 10 seconds, most games have one designated driver who navigates through a rarely treacherous path of bullets and asteroids, while the other three shoot at the enemies. Repeat this across all six levels for the short (half hour) length of the game and you can see how it can get tedious.

Admittedly, it isn’t all bad, and the game provides reasonable entertainment for at least a few playthroughs as you work on the achievements, which are pretty balanced between easy and challenging. Simply put, though, Aegis Wing does not stand up to repeated playings as well as many other games on the arcade. One can easily cruise through the game on normal difficulty, and insane difficulty rarely offers any problems since enemies drop an obscene amount of extra lives and even if everyone on the team dies you can just restart from the beginning of that level. With little incentive to beat it multiple times, and almost no variety between the levels, Aegis Wing will very quickly gather dust on your hard drive.

But still, there’s no reason not to download it.