Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear

As part of my ‘no new games 2019’ extravaganza, I performed a cull of my wish list. This involved removing a large amount of games that were either added for an unknown reason, because they looked easy, not because I actually wanted to play them. While going through this process, I bought two games that were no longer available on the digital store, one of which was Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear. This was one of the games on the list because it was easy. And it was.

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear is a rail shooter where you play as a guy called Will (I think) through 12 levels of rail shooting, which is essentially a shooting gallery. It doesn’t really make sense as an Xbox Game in the same way Toy Story Mania didn’t make sense, unless there is a gun accessory I don’t know about. Essentially the game play boils down to moving the cursor around and shooting bad guys before they shoot you and also aiming for their heads to score more points. A bad guy will die if you shoot him in the head, his hand or his toe so it doesn’t make too much of difference as long as you hit them.

In addition to the normal shooting, you also get to pilot three different vehicles during the campaign, the main difference being that you can fire rockets and stuff and blow things up.

In terms of music, it’s got a very typical ‘we are in the army’ feel to it and is very generic. The same can be said about it’s dated appearance as well, as the whole thing is a rather depressing yellow, grey colour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

The achievement list is a bit bland and doesn’t offer much variety, however the game does get quite difficult when you start getting in to veteran mode levels (this isn’t a separate difficulty but more of a continuation where you have to do the game again on a higher difficulty.

The easy way of doing this is to plug in some extra controllers which effectively gives you four extra lives as the enemies have four targets to shoot at instead of one. This makes the veteran levels a breeze including the last level which has an achievement attached to it for completing it without reloading checkpoints.

There’s another stupid achievement for completing a level without taking any damage. When you take control of the tank in the tenth mission, you can’t take any damage unless you get completely blown up and die – so you will always finish the level with full health.

There are 16 collectibles in the form of radios you need to shoot throughout the campaign. These were ridiculously hard to see as they blended in to the background really well and fit with the middle ground yellow/grey that’s overtaken this game world.

Outside of these, there are two pain in the ass achievements and the first of these is for using a pistol to kill 250 enemies. The pistol appears to be some kind of backup weapon for when you run out of ammo with your main gun, at least I couldn’t find a way to change to it. It was one of the last achievements I unlocked and I had to settle for firing off 300 rounds of my main gun just to use it. This turned out to be okay because of the last achievement I unlocked. For shooting 25,000 bullets.

I appreciate that this is a rail shooter but the fact I needed nearly three playthroughs and some rubber banding on the helicopter level to unlock this is ridiculous. Why have it so high? Especially when all this does is encourage you to miss a lot – loosely translated as being bad at the game. So playing the game like a 5year old would have got me this achievement faster? Thanks.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear was fun until the end of the normal playthrough. Then it started to repeat itself and become boring. And it’s ugly. However, it is an easy completion and clocks in at around six hours so it doesn’t outstay its welcome too much. Except for that dumbass grind at the end.