For all of you out there distracted by, oh I don’t know, the biggest game of the year, you may have missed the little tidbit that Microsoft released a free (yes, FREE!) game, Aegis Wing, over Xbox Live Arcade yesterday. Aegis Wing, developed internally by interns at MS, is a side-scrolling shmup and is undoubtedly a bit of a ploy to attract developers to the ease of use of the XBLA developer tools. Still, it’s a fun little game with a great feature list for its $0.00 price, including Leaderboards, 4-player Xbox Live games, and voice chat.

What did we think of this bare-bones shooter? Click the jump for our impressions…

The quick-n-dirty

For those of you that can’t wait for the bottom line - yes, Aegis Wing is a decent shooter with some good features and an unbeatable price. I can think of a variety of reasons why you wouldn’t download this title, including lack of internet access, having to stretch an ethernet cable across your house, or straight laziness. None of these are good enough reasons - get off your butt and spend the minute it will take to download this title, and you won’t be sorry. That said, Aegis Wing is definitely NOT a top-shelf title, so don’t expect the next Geometry Wars... this game is a fun little shooter that will keep you occupied for a while, get you some free achievements, and probably lead to a few fun nights of online play, nothing more, nothing less.

In depth

There are some things to like and some things to hate about Aegis Wing, so in the interest of positivity, let’s start with the good. For starters, the game is a fairly solid shooter with decent play control (it’s hard to mess that up in a side-scrolling shoot-em-up though!). The graphics, while not mindblowing, get the job done, and present a decent combination of 2D play with 2.5D graphics. The level design is similarly good, with a decent variety of enemies and some interesting obstacles to be avoided… it reminded me at times of Aero-Blasters for the TG-16, and yes… that’s praise. Boss battles are fairly non-distinguishable, but their 3D models look quite good and they’ve come up with some interesting play mechanics.
The real good news here though is the feature list. Aegis Wing is more fully featured than a lot of for-cash XBLA titles. In addition to the single-player game, the title features a fun 4-player Live game that takes you through the same levels, but gives you the added option of linking up, Voltron-style, with your squad mates. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s a fun mechanic, and one that will definitely lead to same chuckles if you’re listening on your headset. There’s nothing quite like realizing that your four fighters, when formed together, just won’t quite squeeze through that hole in the asteroids. Similarly, for the price of free you get leaderboards, and a good, balanced achievements list. Like most well-balanced games, some of the achievements you’ll get without even trying (link up with other fighters for the first time? Achievement), while others will have you coming back to the game for a while (e.g. beat a level without firing, take no damage in a level, or score 185,000 points).

Well what about the bad? Let’s start with the music… it’s awful. Like worse than Bejeweled 2 on the 360… I thought I’d never hate anything more than that 80’s style lab music, and I was wrong. Thank goodness for in-game MP3 playing and volume controls. The graphics, while they get the job done, look a little worse than even Gamecube era, so for the graphics fiends out there I’ll list this as a minus. As for the gameplay itself (the really important thing), it doesn’t really add anything new… this definitely feels like a game developed by gamers because they had to. This game didn’t start out with a grand new idea, other than “let’s see how quickly and easily we can make a game for XBLA”. Things just don’t feel “tuned” right, unlike a classic like Geometry Wars. Your ship fires too slow, the powerups are interesting but ultimately fairly boring, the enemy list is limited, and the designers use the same trick of blocking off parts of the screen so you can’t avoid enemies over and over and over again.

The Bottom Line
With a little extra time and development love, the game could be a very good, if not great shooter. As it currently stands, it’s passable fun for a few evenings, and the Live features are impressive and will do a lot to give this game more staying power. If more games of this quality came out for free though, I can’t say I’d be complaining!

Verdict: DOWNLOAD