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Sometimes all you're looking for is mindless shoot 'em up fun. Loads of bullets flying across the screen, stuff blowing up all around you, swarms of bad guys threatening to overwhelm you, that kind of thing. If that's what you're looking for, Assault Heroes 2 is right up your alley.

There's some kind of story behind Assault Heroes 2, but to be honest, I couldn't tell you what it is. Something about rogue cyborgs and stuff like that - really, do you play a game like this for the story? I never played the original, so maybe I just missed something.

You play this for the shooting and the blowing up of the stuff.

The little introductory movie sets the stage well. You appear to be in some sort of airplane, flying over a mountain range. A little red guy with a rocket launcher shoots the plane down. As it plummets to Earth, he celebrates, just to get squished by a piece of the plane. Too bad, little fella!

Off you go. You begin in a four wheel drive buggy of sorts that has a number of different weapons. You drive with the left stick and shoot with the right stick. You'll be shooting nearly constantly as most of your weapons have unlimited ammo.

You'll start off blasting away with the mini-gun, and if you're anything like me, you'll be using that weapon as primary no matter the occasion. The right bumper lets you swap out to the cannon, the flamethrower, and the ice gun, though I only rarely used any. The cannon, for instance, is quite powerful, but hard to aim and slow to reload. You can also toss grenades (right trigger) and have a very limited supply of nukes (left trigger).

You can get out of your vehicle to get power-ups by hitting B; sometimes you'll want to get out so that you can get into a different vehicle like a helicopter or a tank. The one thing to watch out for with the tank - you only have limited ammo for the main cannon. Most of the time this isn't a problem but the first time I had it I didn't know and used it all up rapidly by holding down the trigger.

The helicopter, on the other hand, I didn't have much use for in the game.

You drive around, blowing stuff up and shooting guys. If your vehicle gets blown up, you're on foot for a little while, so make sure to take advantage of the "A" button to dodge out of the way of stuff. Usually, there's only a few seconds on foot until a new vehicle appears unless it's one of the long sequences where you're only on foot.

The graphics are very lush and often pretty. However, it can be hard to differentiate between what's going on in the environment and the bad guys, and often times the camera is so far back that you can't really admire the graphics on the ground.

The audio is quite nice, if repetitive. The music works very well with the game and the sound effects are often good and sometimes funny (the suicide bomber guys in particular when they jump off cliffs - when they run at you they almost sound like someone trying to yell in Arabic, which is a bit disconcerting). There's one noise on there that I swear I recognize from another XBLA game, maybe Smash TV.

If you are familiar with Smash TV, actually, you'll find this game to be a nice compliment to that play style.

The two biggest annoyances for me were the "hit points" of your vehicle and the boss battles. Your vehicle could take multiple hits, but I could never figure out where I was supposed to see how damaged I was, and therefore never knew my relative strength during battle (not that it usually mattered much). The boss battles were the opposite in a way; I could see the hit points of the boss, but they just went down so slowly in most cases that it was more a battle against boredom than any real threat to me.

There is multiplayer as well but it's all co-op, either locally or over Xbox Live. Unfortunately for me, every time I tried to play over Xbox Live I could never find a match as the game was just released. There were none out there to join, and the only partner it would repeatedly match me with in the "quick match" mode was always away. You can do the campaign or you can do just one "zone" of the campaign in multiplayer.

In short, this IS an XBLA game, so you can't expect the complexity of a full fledged Xbox 360 game. On the other hand, this is a very fun game for the price and a good way to release some tension in a short while, with each of the areas being fairly quick to play through and the game auto-saving at those points.

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