The campaign mode for me was the bulk of expedition for this game, and within this mode, it is your task to try and find members of your team who disappeared 2 years earlier. Lovely. There are 6... count them, 6 difficulty settings for this game, 3 of which are unlockable. What kind of got me about this was, do you need 6 difficulty settings? Surely with 6, there isn't going to be much difference between them? I have to say though, saying that I can see the good and the bad with it. The good being that if you wanted to tickle your way up the difficulty settings it is a good way to do so instead of going from 0-60 in the click of your fingers. The bad being, could you really play this game 6 times over just for slight boosts to the difficulty? After playing it, I would have to say no, for me, the campaign was only there to be played once. I'll explain why further in the review.
Throughout the campaign, you can collect different abilities and ships, each of which will give new or enhanced perks to take through each level. I did have some issues with the game, particularly the campaign and this was down to the atmosphere that was created with the story. There wasn't any, it was lacklustre at best, I'm meant to be getting pounded left, right and centre by enemies and the music is as calm as anything, nothing to heighten the tension and what was going on, big enemies would appear and you would think that something was about to kick off, but nope, nothing untoward here, just going about my day as normal killing things.... The game needs that tension for space battle, it's meant to be a rescue mission, not a toddlers lullaby.
Speaking of enemies, nothing really posed a challenge to me, I had it on the middle setting, which I think is the average difficulty, but I didn't really have any issues, enemies didn't really cause a problem as long as I was moving about while shooting, they seemed to die quite easily. Which was nice.
The overall story I found quite dull, it was meant to be this epic rescue mission which I think because of the lacklustre atmosphere created meant I didn't really care whether I saved the members of the team or not. Which if I'm honest shouldn't be the case, it should be there to grab you, drag you in and want to make you find the team, but as the game didn't really give any self-importance to the mission, I didn't care about what I was doing, just flying around these levels shooting stuff up. Which in the grand scheme of things, got a little boring.
Level designs and the lighting used is an interesting one, there is only a certain amount of area around the ship that is shown the rest of it is dark, so sometimes you can't see whats about to come up around the next corner, which did make things interesting as sometimes you might have to make quick manoeuvres to get out of enemies way.
Onslaught was a mode that I enjoyed, just playing against wave after wave of enemies and trying to get as high as I can each time. You can earn stars with the mode and this helps to unlock more maps for you to play in, the longer that you stay alive the more stars you will get! It's a simple mode, but for me with the type of game this is, it works quite well.
Overall, within the campaign there is a lot of room for improvement, the tension and atmosphere created for the story just aren't there and a shaking screen to represent an explosion just isn't going to cut it. The game does have a saving grace within its Onslaught mode, which is entertaining and a time guzzler.
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