Without the Halo name and sound effects, Spartan Assault would be a colorful but otherwise barely remarkable twin-stick shooter. Aside from some annoying stability problems and dumb microtransactions, it’s competently made, but rarely memorable unless you’re playing the online-only co-op.

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The top-down perspective turns the distinctive Halo arsenal into a bunch of pretty boring guns. Only the heat-seeking Needler has any real complexity to it beyond point and shoot, so most of them handle too similarly to make you play differently. Most of the variety comes from the armor abilities, like health regen.A few of the 30 single-player missions get ambitious, allowing you to drive a Scorpion tank or hijack a Covenant vehicle. It could’ve used more of that kind of freedom, because the typical search-and-destroy and timed holdouts against waves of enemies get old pretty quick.The Xbox One-exclusive two-player co-op is much better designed. Its five missions against The Flood are faster paced and have objectives that require teamwork, like lowering force fields to let the other guy through, and they’re quick to run through in just a few minutes. It’s the kind of thing that would’ve been great to play with a buddy on the couch, but Spartan Assault needs a second Xbox One to make it happen.The plot that ties it all together is flatly presented with a few animatic cutscenes and occasional voiceovers, but mostly it’s big blocks of text that precede each mission. It feels low budget, and leaning forward to read the tale of two Spartan soldiers defending an Earth colony between Halo 3 and Halo 4 didn’t hold my interest for long.Spartan Assault isn’t a difficult game, but the scoring element gives it some replay value beyond the five hours it took to beat. I like that earning a high score is about pacing yourself - you have to string together as many kills as possible within four seconds of each other to maximize it. Optional modifiers, like one that depletes your shield as you fire, and another that reduces the ammo of weapons picked up off the ground, do give you some more challenging ways to play. I was surprised at how often it crashed back to the Dashboard, though - three times in five hours. This isn’t a complex game!But the worst thing about Spartan Assault is its obnoxious microtransactions, which let you skip experience point grinding to change your weapon loadout at the start of a mission. Considering the only real point in using this gear is to bump up your score on the leaderboard, that’s pretty gross.