Though you spend most of your time in Assault Heroes piloting the assault buggy, should your car suffer too much damage, you'll bail out and continue the fray on foot. While fighting boss battles, you can expect to see a few waves of lower-level minions come at your vehicle, just to complicate things. The first was a gigantic mecha-spider, who crawled out of its lair and put up a pretty hefty fight before we took it down for good, and the second, which we encountered on a later level, was a massive mechanical structure that looked more like a wall than a monster and had several weak points you had to attack before it would go down.

While speeding and shooting our way through the game, we got a chance to check out two of the end-level bosses. From soldiers with their peashooters to gun emplacements, as well as more imposing foes such as battle copters and massive tanks, the action is consistent throughout each level. You'll need to keep your right thumb warmed up, too, because the game throws a ton of enemies at you on the screen. You drive with the left analog stick and fire your weapons in any direction using the right stick. The game, which plays like top-down arcade shooters such as Ikari Warriors and Smash TV, will find you mostly at the wheel of a nimble and rugged-looking buggy, complete with high-powered machine guns. Assault Heroes is a fast-paced driving combat game for Xbox Live Arcade. Ikari Warriors meets Smash TV meets rally games.

Along with a minigolf game, we got a chance to play a work-in-progress version of a vehicular-combat game called Assault Heroes, which should be hitting the Xbox 360's online distribution service later this year.

Once there, and having greeted the local Sierra representatives on hand, we were presented with a couple of surprises: two Xbox Live Arcade games that were previously unannounced for the press event. Arriving late in the evening at our resort in Palm Springs, California, for a recent Sierra press event, we struck off in the dark to find the location of an outdoor welcome reception.

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