Developer: Codeglue
Publisher: Codeglue
Year: 2016
Genre: Arcade
System: Windows
Rocket Riot is an arcade game where you fly around an arena in a jetpack shooting at other enemies with rockets until you beat them all. Originally released for the X-Box 360 in the summer of 2009, I wanted to revisit the game and slowly played through the single player campaign in the Steam release. There isn’t much to say about this one. You essentially do the same thing in different level layouts, with the occasional mini boss thrown in and they sometimes mix it up by having different level types, like running a football across a level for points, but for the most part you are doing the same thing, shooting other guys with rockets, most levels. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, I play arcade games all the time where you just do the same thing repeatedly, but once you play the first set of levels you kinda know what the rest of the game is like and it doesn’t really increase the difficulty over time.
It’s too bad about that because the core of the game plays very well. It feels good flying around and flinging rockets around, and the game has a nice retro aesthetic. I suppose the game itself is retro now since it was a 2009 release, but what I mean is that it has an art style that has 2D art but with 3D blocks flying around when things explode. It looks good in motion. It’s very strongly influenced by 80s British computer games too with cassette loading screens between levels and music that feels like it was slightly influenced by that era.
Another frustration with the release on Steam is that it’s missing multiplayer, which is arguably half the game. The gameplay is a very good fit for it and works well on the X360 release, but is missing from the PC version. Even a local multiplayer feature would have been appreciated.
Anyway, the game is fine. I can’t make a strong endorsement for it but if you want to occasionally play an arcade thing for a few minutes and don’t mind it being a little repetitive, then maybe you’ll have fun with it.