Yes. It's this game again. But I'm glad it's getting a lot of word-of-mouth buzz and feel the need to contribute to that, because, well...
When I first saw
Rocket Riot on XBLA I was greeted with the above image. I didn't give it a second glance. I mean,
look at it - kind of a cheap looking logo, a fairly generic sounding name and a tacky Flash-style design, the whole thing just
screams 'filler.' Which is an incredible shame because when I tried it following Topher's recommendation on
Retroforce GO! the story in game couldn't be more different.
I'm not sure whose idea it was to let this game slip in quietly, without fanfare, among two other fairly high profile releases,
Magic: The Gathering and
Sam & Max when in fact it's one of the best games released on the platform so far but it seems to me that they just didn't have the deserved confidence in this game.
So, the game then. It's a bit like if you took
Worms, made it real time and then made it so everyone had jetpacks all the time and could only use the bazooka. And made the arenas much bigger. With different play styles like a capture-the-flag style rugby game and the occasional boss battle. And added
Bomberman style powerups. And made it a sort of retro-styled 2.5D.
Yeah. A bit like that.
More than anything it gave me the feeling of playing a re-make of an long-forgotten-but-awesome Amiga game. I thought perhaps I was alone in this until I listened to them talking about it on
Giant Bomb and they said exactly the same thing. I've played about 55 out of 80 single player levels so far and dabbled in the multiplayer (which is sure to be incredible) and there are really few bad things I have to say about this game. Perhaps there are too many deathmatch-y levels compared to the equally fun other styles of play. Maybe it takes a few too many easy levels before the difficulty starts to feel right - but by halfway through the challenge is significant. Apart from those fairly minor nitpicks, though, I can't imagine what Codeglue could have done to make the game they made better.
Except perhaps change the name and make the cover art better so people wouldn't pass it by, like I did at first. Get it. Now. The game deserves to be played.
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As soon as I'm back up and running on my 360 I'll be downloading it.
It's all about grabbing the powerups. A hard boss can be obliterated in seconds with one of those rapid fire suckers.
I don't know, I'm no expert gamer and at level 55 the most I've had to retry a level is 5 times, and the vast majority are done in 1-3 tries. I think the learning curve is good, maybe even a little too slow at first.
Certainly I can see the game not really being someone's thing, which is fine but 'I hate this game very much'? Eh? what? What's to -hate-?
Sounds like you are about where I was about the game - I was in a XBL party when I was trying the demo and my big question was 'this game is okay, but it seems too easy so far, does it get harder?'
And the answer was 'yes,' so I decided to buy it but also it's worth noting that once it starts getting harder it starts getting better too because it becomes a much more frantic game.
I was worried that single player wouldn't be satisfying but so far I've been pleased and every so often it'll throw a completely different mission at you out of the blue just to mix things up a bit. One of my favourites of these is this level which has clones of you hiding in jars, so you want to carefully crack each jar to fight only a few at a time but what ends up happening once the rockets start to fly is that more and more start following in a swarm and panic ensues.
So the single player IS more than just a training ground for multiplayer, it's got some cool designs, even though the game's heart seems to be in multiplayer.
It's not bad just not my cup of tea.
If you wish, hit me up on Xbox Live and I'd be down to play some multiplayer anytime.