New IPs have become a huge rarity in the video game space. More often than not we see sequels or spinoffs rather than a truly new IP or an interesting art style. Codeglue managed to make Rocket Riot a fun and interesting game without reliance on an existing property or super realistic graphics. What Codeglue did create is a charming new IP with a fantastic old school art style and tremendously fun gameplay.
Let’s get the story business of this game out of the way up front. A legless pirate named Blockbeard has escaped and is stealing the legs of everyone else in the world. As a solution to the problem of being legless a scientist comes up with the idea of a jet pack that screws onto your butt. Yeah, you read that right. The story shows up between the 8 “worlds” that you travel to throughout the course of the game. It provides an adorable and sometimes hilarious backdrop to the nonstop action the game provides.
The art style of Rocket Riot has a very throwback quality to it. Everything appears pixelated because it is made up of tiny blocks. It feels like an 8 bit filter was applied over top of Worms and things were changed from flattened to slightly polygonal. As you move through the worlds you can see that everything seems to be made up of small cubes instead of small flat pixels. This style really suits the game well as do the cast of 80 characters that can be unlocked by destroying them in the single or multiplayer experience. You’ll see everything from pirates to robots and you can pit them against each other in crazy rocket shooting battles.
The action in the game is kind of like a two stick shooter, except with a different twist. The left stick moves your legless character through the levels while the right stick shoot rockets. The thing is instead of just pressing a direction to shoot immediately, the game instead requires you to charge your shot by holding the direction you want to shoot and then letting go to release a rocket. The longer you hold the charge the further the rocket will travel and while it travels it will stick to a physics-based arc making it more challenging to hit objects further away from you. On top of this there are about 20 different powerups in the game, some of which are actually power downs, doing anything from providing bigger or faster rockets to causing all your rockets to shoot straight downwards or having a little bang flag come out of your launcher instead of an actual rocket.
All of this action takes place in 80 levels, split into 8 worlds with 10 levels in each. Each of the worlds has its own theme such as the inside of a computer, a pirate ship or a spooky haunted house. Most interesting is the fact that everything in the levels is destructible much like in Worms; however, it rapidly regenerates itself recreating obstacles and places to hide as the action moves forward. When playing through each level you are given a certain objective such as killing a set number of enemies, destroying certain objects, finding a particular character hidden in the background or carrying a football and throwing it through a goal. Every 10th level is a boss fight with the boss being in the theme of the world he governs over. These boss battles rapidly become challenging and are rewarding to complete.
The movement and rocket shooting feel absolutely fantastic and hitting targets far away from you with the perfect arc is extremely satisfying. The powerups provide a way out of a bad situation and sometimes increase the challenge and stress level when you accidentally pick up one of the red blocks causing a power down or some sort of handicap. My only overall complaint about the gameplay is that the objectives end up being a bit repetitive over time. Boss battles help to break it up a bit but it would have been interesting to have levels calling for limited destruction of the environment or ones that start you out with a handicap of some kind and force you to work around it. The single player game does include an endless mode simply asking you to survive as long as possible, which is fun but doesn’t quite take away the repetitive nature of the existing objectives.
The multiplayer component of Rocket Riot really helps to break up the slightly repetitive single player experience. The online game offers standard deathmatch and a few other modes like Rugby Riot which uses the football in goal rules from the singleplayer. Also included is a mode called Golden Guy which has you trying to grab a golden suit and hold onto it for as long as possible. Playing online is frantic and very fun. The human players don’t die in one hit like the CPU controlled characters in single player, and their movement is much less predictable. The game is even fun with random online players and I’ve lost hours jumping into quick matches, though most are playing only standard deathmatch at the moment.
Overall, Rocket Riot is a charming and fun game with an original art style and a super large group of characters to unlock. The multiplayer is fun and chaotic and can easily suck away hours at a time even in vanilla deathmatch. Even with the recurring game modes in the single player the game is deeper and has more content than the $10 price tag implies. If you enjoy two stick shooters, hectic multiplayer or faster paced Worms-style action you’ll definitely enjoy the Rocket Riots package. If I had to assign a score (which I’m not in love with doing in reviews) I would go with a 4/5.
You can check out the trailer below and go to the official Rocket Riot blog for a taste of what the game looks like.
