I played Aegis Wing for a few hours Wednesday night while I was waiting on the Halo 3 Beta to be fixed and released. It has been a while since I’ve played a side-scrolling shooter, but my maneuvering and dodging skills came back quickly. I started playing a little single player and then I got an invite from a guy on my Friends List. I played the rest of the night in a room of guys doing 4 player co-op. The game was ok in single player, but it really shines on co-op mode. When you’re playing with other people you can merge your ships together. When you do this one person flies and the other people who are attached can shoot in any directions (instead of just shooting strait ahead like when you are not attached) with a more powerful weapon. We quickly worked through the game on Normal mode and proceed to play it on the Insane difficulty. I really like playing it on Insane because in addition to really being a challenge there are no extra lives. If you die you can only get back in if one of your teammates picks up an extra life. When they do get the extra life you spawn back in. This leads to some great teamwork as you try to work together to keep each other alive.

The game itself looks good. It plays like most classic side-scrollers with each level getting harder by sending more enemies and harder bosses at the end of each level. Unlike some side-scrollers your ship is very maneuverable. This makes it pretty easy to dodge enemy attacks with a little practice. Also, instead of dying with only one hit you do have some heath which lets you take about 4 hits before dying. I prefer it this way because one-hit-kills games are really annoying. I found Aegis Wing difficult enough to be challenging but not so hard I got annoyed with it.

There are four super weapons that are available all have distinct features that make them useful. The shield protects you from attacks, but does nothing to hurt other enemies. The laser does a great amount of damage, but only in a strait line. The homing missiles spread out nicely, but if there is not enough enemies around then some of the shots will be wasted. Finally, the “Gorgon Burst” knocks out other ships around you but leaves a lot of debris on the screen that will kill you if you hit it. The achievements are a mix of co-op based ones and ones you could get alone. One thing to note is that the achievements don’t seem to be stackable. So, you have to beat it on Normal and on Hard to get them all. However, you don’ have to play the whole game to get the achievement for winning. You just need to beat the last level. So, you can join a co-op game in progress and as long as you beat the last level you get the achievement for beating the game.

For a game that was given away for free I’m really impressed. The could have easily charged $5 for this and I would probably have picked it up. It is nice to see that Microsoft is not so money crazy that they have completely forgot about us, the gamers.