Steel Assault Review

Steel Assault puts players in the virtual shoes of Taro Takahashi, a resistance soldier on a revenge mission against Magnus Pierce, a famous inventor and roboticist turned army general. After the cities decimated by an thorium bomb: a radiation dispersal weapon that rendered cities inhabitable for years, Magnus rose from the ashes to begin a large-scale purge which included Taro’s parents. Takahashi hunts Pierce across various areas to avenge his parents’ death.

Steel Assault is a 2D 16-action platformer that feels straight out of the Super NES. Our hero, Taro Takahashi, has a few tricks up his sleeve in order to conquer the game’s enemies and challenging boss fights. Your default attack is two fold. If you’re up close with an enemy, you’ll punch their lights out while any other distance, you’ll whip out your whip to smash enemies. The whip can be used in all eight directions.

You can also pick up power ups such as Electricity which will allow you to fire electric balls for a short period of time or even pick up a shield for temporary invincibility. What makes Steel Assault stand out from most 2D action platformer is Taro’s zipline. It allows players to reach higher areas during platforming sequences and it’s also very useful against certain bosses to avoid certain damage.

Taro can also double jump and slide. For the latter, you have a meter meaning you can’t slide all the time, but really helpful to dodge bosses’ projectiles when the screen is filled of them. While as you’d expect, when you’re hit in mid-air, you suffer from fallback damage, however thankfully, you can realign your movement mid-air and having certain damage or death.

The game features beautifully hand-crafted levels all in gorgeous 16-bit beauty. Each level is uniquely designed to provide a different challenge also each with its own theme and color palette. Although, enemies do leave a lot to be desired as most enemies are repeated. Bosses on the other hand are top-notch in design and challenge. The score is an addictive FM-synthesized score which is sometimes unfortunately drowned out when trying to focus on the non-stop action on screen.

But as you’d expect not all is perfect, although Steel Assault only has one major flaw: lack of gameplay content. While the game does have a handful of difficulty settings and an arcade mode, once you’ve done all of these, there’s no much of an incentive to replay the game unless you’re looking to beat the game as fast as possible and beat you’re own personal score.

Lack of depth in gameplay content aside, Steel Assault is one of the best, more challenging, 2D action platformer in recent memory. Its mix of platforming, combat, retro-style and zip line usage offers a unique and addictive challenge. And having multiple difficulty settings makes this game accessible to everyone; newcomers to the genre or hardened players who can play games like Contra without dying. If you love a good challenge and/or 2D action platformers, Steel Assault is a must play gaming experience.