Winter Uprising Review: Asteroids Do Concern Me

get the sun!

Asteroids Do Concern Me opens with a Star Wars/Flash Gordon-inspired crawl detailing an intentionally over-the-top story narrated by what sounds like a constipated elderly man. He rambles about a culture obsessed with flying through an asteroid belt, believed to be “the oldest remnants of the universe’s chaotic creation,” in order to obtain a great power and achieve immortality. Only one man, Rocky Montana, was brave enough to survive the perilous right of passage.

It’s some seriously cheesy stuff, accentuated by a raconteur who sounded as if each word was painful to utter, but it totally had me jazzed for the game. I was ready; this game was going to be awesome. And then it just sorta wasn’t. It seems like the game lost its momentum after the initial sequence. It’s not a bad game, but it’s really a one-trick pony, no matter how many coats of paint are thrown on top of it to spruce it up.

Collect suns and don’t fly into an asteroid. The longer you can accomplish this task, the more points you’ll accumulate and the longer you’ll stave off reading one of the insults this game will hurl at you when your rocket ship inevitably crashes. The ceiling will kill you, the floor will kill you, and just about everything in between not shaped like a sun will kill you. That narrator wasn’t joking when he talked about the perilous journey, and there’s a reason so many of your ancestors didn’t reach immortality.

You cannot directly control the ship, but you can control the vertical booster that prevents it from immediately plummeting to the cavey surface. The ship automatically flies from left to right, and you feather the boost to weave above or beneath asteroids and other obstacles.

If it doesn’t sound too exciting, well, that’s because it’s honestly not. There are four different modes of window dressing, including a pretty awesome monochrome setting complete with retro sound effects, but the fundamental game is exactly the same. I just never felt as if the actual game did anything to really hook me in, and it’s a killer that a game focused around amassing a high score is lacking online leaderboards.

I really wanted to like Asteroids a lot, and it really had me entertained for a few minutes. But, the actual game itself comes up a bit short and is overly simplistic. It might be worth a quick demo just to check out the silly narration, and I’m sure some people might enjoy the fast-paced arcade action, but it didn’t do anything for me.

Rating: ★★½☆☆

Visit the Xbox Marketplace to download a free demo of Asteroids Do Concern Me for Xbox 360.

Asteroids Do Concern Me was provided for review by Evil Robot Logic. It is available for 80 MS points ($1).

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Posted on December 12, 2010 by Mike Wall in Reviews, xblig

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.

  • http://twitter.com/Spectre3353 Spectre3353

    It is a little bit of a shame they didn’t do a little bit more with the gameplay. There was obviously a lot of effort put into the presentation and it really shows… it’s one of the best looking and sounding XBLIG games I’ve played in a while. It’s just too bad the gameplay is so simple that it really only entertains for a few minutes at best.

  • http://twitter.com/NandWandTandS NoiseWordsThingsShit

    Nitpicking, but it seems kinda redundant to implement a 1-5 star rating system and then throw this in between 2 and 3, even though the written element of the review paints it as a 2 at best.

    And I thought it was going to be a 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 system, without the .5′s in the middle. Just curious…

  • http://www.armlessoctopus.com Mike Wall

    I think most people understand that when you have a 2.5 it is obviously somewhere between a 2 and a 3. Movie scales are the same way where you have a 4-star system, but you can have a movie that is 1.5 stars.

    Yeah, it possibly could have been a 2. It has its redeeming qualities, but isn’t a very good game on the whole. I need to get used to slotting games into ratings too, and that is a valid criticism.

  • http://twitter.com/DaveVoyles Dave Voyles

    Spectre,

    It does seem like Evil Robot Logic took quite a bit of pride in the graphic design of the game, but some of that work perhaps could be put towards the gameplay itself. But then again, there isn’t much room for innovation in a genre like this as it is pretty simple. That’s half the fun of releasing a title and waiting for reviews though – it makes you aware of what people’s thoughts are and what you need to work on.

    Noise,

    I’m fine with nitpicking as it allows us to see what people think about the changes made to the site.

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