According to Black Hole Assault, the 22nd century sees earth technology advance to the point where exploration of the immediate solar system is not only possible, but necessary due to resource constraints. Humans are attempting to harvest the resources of the entire solar system but have met with trouble from alien invaders. It is up to a small force of humans who recognize and understand the threat to confront the aliens head on. The weapon of choice in this game is the Cybernetic Anthropomorphized Machine, or C.A.M. The C.A.M. is a large robot that fights 1-on-1 against alien robots. All of the gameplay in Black Hole Assault revolves around single-round, 1-on-1 robot fighting action. There are 10 backdrops against which to beat up robots, including various planets and moons around the solar system. The game has 4 different modes. The main story mode is Operation BHA. The exhibition mode allows players to customize matches down to the robots each player will use and the backdrop to play on. The exhibition mode can be configured to allow one or even both fighters to be controlled by the computer. Further, the game has tournament and league modes.
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The very first thing you need to do is hug your favorite plush, or get some counseling in order to snap yourself out of the sheer depression from the realization that we live in some kind of nightmare timeline where Heavy Nova got a sequel and Dynamite Headdy didn't. Secondly, destroy every copy of Heavy Nova you find, because it is really really really bad.
Now back to this game. I have to give some credit to Micronet. They made some improvements here, incredibly basic ones that even the most amateur developer should've known to put in firsthand. Notable gameplay improvements include being generally faster and more responsive, hitboxes with some form of logic behind them like no invincible crouching, and not forcing ludicrous penalties for taking heavy damage like not being able to punch/kick or get up at some point this century after falling over. They also focused it entirely on being a fighting game instead of having those stupid pointless sidescrolling sections. It even has a tournament and league mode, as if they expected this game to take off and gain some kind of following. I like the absurd optimism here.
Don't get your hopes up, because this game still sucks. The CPU manages to both be annoying and absolutely fucking stupid. It's absurdly obvious how much it operates on nothing but input from the player. One of the CPU characters ALWAYS jumps backwards whenever you yourself jump towards him. There's many situations where I won matches with nothing but jabs to the face, as well as matches where the very same happened to me. I'm not even sure you can block in this game, none of the buttons are dedicated to it and holding back didn't save me from getting jab-locked to death. Searching for "block" and "guard" in some guy's faq for this on GameFAQs garnered no results. So yeah, I don't think it's here. It wasn't in Heavy Nova either, so much for basic improvements I guess.
To add on to my complaints about the CPU, it's worth note that you can edit their logic similar perhaps to Fire Pro Wrestling games down to the probability of how much they'll throw, crouch, walk, etc. This would be interesting and put those tournament modes to good use for watching the CPU fight. One problem though, every time I fiddled with these the CPU would just stand there and do nothing. Fantastic.
Micronet also decided it'd be great to add some gimmicks to the fights like low gravity and ice physics. That's right, ice physics in a fighting game. Anytime you walk backwards in the ice physics stage you fall over btw. I hope an anvil falls on these people.
This is marginally better than Heavy Nova, but the only way you could make a game worse than Heavy Nova would be if you changed it's music to distorted babies screaming their heads off and put flashing strobe lights in it ala Mystery of Convoy.
My assault was thoroughly butt hole'd.