Aces of the Galaxy

Drooling alien lizards bent on humanity’s destruction? All right, so you won’t find an engaging story lurking in the remote reaches of this railed shooter, but you will discover immediately accessible space combat and the slickest screen filling pyrotechnics yet seen on Xbox Live Arcade.

Three ships offer a conventional choice between lumbering and durable, swift and fragile, or balanced, but all pack rapid fire chain guns, multiple lock-on cluster missiles, and powerful torpedoes. You can upgrade only one armament at a time, but slowing time and rolling across the screen lets you milk some longevity from each ship. Scanning for invisible enemies and racking up score bonuses as you experiment with firing patterns also provides a modicum of strategic freedom.

If you find the purple icon hidden in each mission’s twirling debris and copious special effects, you and a local or online co-op buddy can chart a customized course through nine of the 25 challenging levels built around fiery stars, asteroid belts, and fields of ice crystals. You can even explore branching paths within each otherwise-strict course by detonating gangs of special glowing goons.

Aces of the Galaxy ain’t perfect, of course. It sucks to miss a power-up or plow into an obstacle because the predetermined flight path shifted for no particular reason. The fleeting boss battles are also identically forgettable, and no quantity of glossy explosions and gee-whiz vapor trails can mask the inherently repetitive nature of interstellar buttonmashing. But Aces is so mindlessly enjoyable that you’ll soar right past those flaws.