XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

Armor Valley comes to you from Protege Production in Singapore and offers either one or two players a chance to control a state of the art hover copter (SH-90 Silver Hawk) on the battle field.

The premise is very straight forwards as it is with most shooters, shoot and win! However, Armor Valley does it slightly differently - like I have already said, you control a hover copter, which is armed with guns and missiles , but you also get to order (though you don't control) new ground units onto the battle field, such as tanks, rocket launchers and disruptors(which disrupt the enemy buildings shields). These ground troops do come at a cost however, in the form of credits, which seems to be earned by destroying enemy troops and vehicles. Unlike in other games though, you do not control the ground units; these act on their own by travelling to the enemy base and attacking automatically.

You have a limited supply of bullets and missiles and if you need a resupply, you need to fly back to your base to get restocked, oh yes and refuelled, as this too is limited. However, don't expect to take off as soon as you land, though you can, you may as well not have bothered as the loading process takes some time to complete, which is a nice touch to up the realism slightly.

The theory behind the controls is straight forward, but the game makes use of most of the gamepads buttons and sticks, certainly more than your average XBLIG, so there is a fair bit to remember.

I quite enjoyed Armor Valley, when I go into the controls and also kept remembering to easy myself into a landing rather than come down hard and crash!

You can either play a single player game in story more through ten different levels, oh play a quick campaign against another local player or AI.

As for its price tag, Armor Valley comes in at 400MSP, which though it isn't too bad for a game of this quality, it would no doubt fare better at 240MSP, but it isn't.

It might also be worth mentioning that Armor Valley won an award for "Excellence In Audio" at IGF China 2009. Well deserving in my opinion.

To be honest, I found the gameplay a bit slow going, so I rate it a shaky