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I know, I know.. I really play too many arcade-style shooters. I don’t care, they’re awesome. Atomhex is a dual-stick arena shooter, that means it shares the same basic concept with Robotron or Geometry Wars.  Aromhex is a breath of fresh air when it comes down to what’s beyond the controls though, we’re talking gameplay, baby.

Atomhex adds some new and interesting things in the mix to spruce up that dual-stick gameplay we know and love. The thing it does best is without a doubt the enemies. The different kinds of strange beings you encounter during a gameplay session all have their own unique ability, pattern if you like. These enemies spawn when the atoms and hexes that appear on the playing field collide, the atoms sticking to the hexes when they get close. The atoms and hexes can’t hurt you, you collect atoms to change the color of your shots. Hexes you can actually poke around a bit (try it, there’s a secret hidden here!) to only get atoms to the hexes you want. The more atoms on a hex, the tougher enemies that hex will spawn. To quote the creator Incitti himself: “The Vespas will compete with you for Hexes. The Cholox will grow to block your path. Grex will charge at you and detonate. Crux will freeze you and  then try to fry you and the Puncti will bounce around randomly and get in your way.”  You’ll learn it, live it and love it. This right here is great game design that, while hard to do justice in words, works so stunningly great in-game it brings tears to my eye.

There are even more things to watch out for too! When to atoms collide they create a Karkata. These buggers always go straight at you, stealing some of your energy and then trying to create a web you have to shoot to get past. The only way to kill these is to shoot them from behind, quite a challenge when the whole screen is filled with other nasties. Like I said before, the atoms all have different colors, the amount of colors increasing as you progress. When you collect an atom your shots will turn into that color and when an atom and a hex has joined, only shots of the right color will hurt it. Combine this with the fact that you get a higher multiplier and score if you collect many atoms of the same color and you get a very interesting gameplay element, the balance of when to shoot things and when to focus on gathering. With a multiplier that goes up to 10000x your score the system allows people who master it quite ridiculous scores, a very rewarding thing.

But wait, there’s more! When a hex is joined with six atoms you go SUB-ATOMIC. All the enemies disappear and the atomhex grow to epic proportions. This mode plays more like a boss battle with the six atoms circling around the hex core. Each atom has three Quarks in it and each quark has petals in each of the six game colors. You change the color of your shots by shooting the hex core and you need to constantly match the petal colors to get rid of the quarks. You can rack up some great scores in this mode and when it’s over it’s back to the regular game, hopefully with an even higher multiplier. There are quite a few power ups too, ranging from freezing everything to firing rainbow shots these will certainly help you on your quest for the highest score.

All this tasty gameplay comes with a great visual presentation, good audio, 100 in-game achievements to get and a local leaderboard so you can flash those high scores. And for 240MS (THREE PUNY EARTH DOLLARS!) it’s a steal too. Atomhex is the evolution of the dual-stick shooter gameplay and adds some much needed strategy and variation to the mix. When compared to say, Geometry Wars this game is years ahead in the actual gameplay. Escapist Games did console gamers a great favor when they ported this game to Xbox Live Indie Games. Both their and Mark Incitti’s effort should not go without appreciation, I suggest you buy this game RIGHT NOW!