XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

The creator of Grid Wars, the game that was such a good Geometry Wars clone, that it was taking a good chunk out of BizarreCreations sales, Mark Incitti is back with a new creation - Atomhex, which the publishers Escapist Games claim to be “an entirely new and completely different game, far superior to both Geometry Wars and his original clone".

Atomhex is a fast paced colourful dual stick shooter, in which you have to deal with a world of Atoms and Hexes - sounds strange right. What you have to do is keep your ship (Naus) alive until six atoms join onto a hex and go subatomic - simple right? Wrong, because once an atom and a hex join, they start releasing all sorts of trouble, which you must effectively fight off using your ships weapons - sounds easy again, but the trouble is if you wish to destroy a joined hex and its atoms, you must have the same laser shots as the hex colour, which is done by shooting down the shields of a lone hex and collecting it. Needless to say I didn't manage to make it after quite a while of playing - in fact I didn't even get into the top ten! It kinda reminded of all the money I used to waste in games arcades as a kid, playing games that I loved, but had absolutely no skill at!

Once the atoms have gone subatomic, you get sucked into the subatomic world of the Atomhex, where you must escape from by splitting all the atoms and destroying the quarks that they release - a quark is a six petalled thingy with each petal being a different colour, which you must destroy by shooting it with the same colour laser.

The game consists of various powerups and score multipliers ranging from x2 to x9, which depletes over time, but can be multiplied to reach up to x10000.

Apart from having high score tables holding up to 100 scores for each of the three difficulty levels, there is also various awards and your personal bests, which includes scores, times, number of hexes collected and longest runs in each colour for each of the three difficulty levels.

Though I totally sucked at Atomhex I did have great fun with it, particularly as it was a dual stick shooter , which I tend to enjoy. My advice is why not give it a go, especially at 80, it's a steal!