Nano Assault Review
Nano Assault from developer Shin’en takes space shooting combat to a microscopic size. Clear away hazardous organisms off of cells with your nanite ship and a small arsenal of weapons. Unfortunately, top notch graphics don’t alleviate the repetitive and occasionally awkward gameplay.
Stages are divided between regular cell exploration levels and boss levels that are challenge you with intense, bullet-hell shooter-like gameplay. In cell stages, you’re required to recover stray pieces of DNA and destroy all enemy viruses on the cell. It’s a novel concept but the developers failed to push it beyond simply sweeping over each cell until everything is dead. The formula gets tired quickly, and there is little to liven it up later in the game. More variety in stage design and goals could have kept the gameplay from stagnating so quickly.
Use your main gun or a selection of secondary weapons to clear cells.
Boss stages require more twitch gaming skills. The camera is behind your ship as you fly forward into the screen with a barrage of enemy attacks and cells landing around you. Stereoscopic 3D is meant to aid your perspective here, but it’s not very effective when judging the distance of enemy projectiles. You still aren’t able to see exactly how far away an incoming projectile is, only that it’s coming toward you in a general area, which can make dodging a bit messy. This is only made worse by the fact that you can’t move and aim separately. Moving the ship moves the aiming reticule, which is awkward during boss fights where a constant stream of attacks require you to keep moving. This set-up makes the game challenging, yes, but it also makes the game downright annoying in many instances.
Besides the aforementioned moving/aiming situation, the controls could really use a few more features to fix some of the more frustrating aspects of the game. During cell stages, the camera view is constantly shifting to follow your ship, but oftentimes the shift creates and awkward perspective that can be a huge problem when you’re trying to shoot down an enemy. A quick way of reorienting the camera would have been a huge help in this regard. Furthermore, the camera perspective on boss fights is as much trouble as the boss itself. You’re constantly fighting to not only aim properly, but to see clearly where you’re aiming at all. It may be a flashy camera angle but it comes with a bevy of problems.
Dodge attacks while you wear down boss defenses.
Visually, Nano Assault is easily one of the most gorgeous games on the 3DS so far. These screenshots don’t really do justice to the sleek yet detailed environments that your nanite ship traverses. The colors are vibrant on the screen and every object has a realistic surface and texture appearance. It can be pretty trippy to look at sometimes, but I mean that in the best of ways. The stereoscopic 3D may not be a big help gameplay-wise, but the effect is used perfectly for the graphics, where it creates a beautiful sense of depth and surface texture. The soundtrack isn’t half bad either, with a techno-beat that perfectly suits the graphics and gameplay setting.
The story mode is quite short; only a couple of hours will see you to the credits, even if you die and retry levels often. The real value of Nano Assault is based around replay value. Arcade mode lets you replay any stage with bonus challenges such as reaching a specific amount of points or not losing a life. You can upload your scores to an online leaderboard, but be warned that this causes some players’ game to freeze up (there is as of yet no official cause or solution to this problem). Adding extra challenges to each stage helps to make the experience feel at least somewhat fresh again, but these bonus goals don’t change the fundamentally bland gameplay.
Flying into the depth of the screen looks great but can be a pain to maneuver.
Nano Assault has some good ideas and decent shooter gameplay, but even with only thirty-two levels the game stagnates and grows disappointingly repetitive which only makes its faults all the more noticeable. It’s not bad for the $20 price tag, but in the end it’s still a rather shallow game with more than its share of problems. If you can look past these there is at least a bit of replay value here, but otherwise this is a short, bland experience.
Rating: 
