 |
Review: Rocket: Robot on Wheels
n64
12.25.02 / 06:13AM / Boris
Surprisingly innovative platformer, cursed by a generally flavorless mascot
Rocket: Robot on Wheels is a really innovative gimmick platformer. Rocket, the robot, has two things going for it that all other platformers after it have yet to duplicate ‚ it can pick up nearly every object in the game (including enemies) and manipulate them, and Rocket is on a single wheel. The former makes puzzles a lot of fun, because they're more innovative than "Go here, touch that sprite, come back and drop off the sprite" (standard fare in most of Rare's games) ‚ you literally have to carry the sprite, throw it over obstacles if need be, and dodge enemies which will steal the item you're carrying. The latter is fun because, being a wheeled character, you don't exactly stop when you stop pushing the control stick. Rocket gradually rolls to a halt, and if he's on a slope, it takes a lot longer. This takes getting used to, much the same way that the generic ice levels that all platformers since Super Mario Bros. 2 have invoked, except it's a lot more subtle than "Snow makes things slippery."
Incidently, and this is a pet peeve of mine, why is it that every platformer makes the mistake in snow levels that jumping around is more effective than running on ice? Have you ever tried to jump on ice? I did that once, and landed squarely on my ass. Ever since Mario, jumping around on ice has been the main thing that keeps you from falling off of the sheer cliffs that ice levels always seem to hang out around.
There's probably a very good reason you've never heard of Rocket. He's one of the most flavorless mascots around. He doesn't talk, he's not particularly cute (basically, he's a football helmet, a torso, and a wheel), and he doesn't have any real hope for a spin off racing title, golf game, tetris clone, or the like (no, I'm not a Mario hate-ah, I'm just a little tired of spin-offitis, and Mario's the biggest whore of those). In fact, barring this review, I doubt you'll ever hear of him again, unless you pick up the cart, which I imagine is a cheap endeavor by now.
The plot: Rocket is the robot assistant of some sci-fi Walt Disney, who is opening a walrus-mascot theme park tomorrow. "Wally World" and its lazy, slob of a walrus, is apparently all the rage. However, the walrus has a sidekick named Jojo the Racoon, who is jealous of Wally, and as soon as the professor leaves, Jojo clonks Rocket on the head, steals Wally, and attempts to recreate Wallyworld into Jojoworld. Your job, fix the place and stop Jojo before the professor returns.
Ok, yeah, that's a pretty lame plot. It's also a bit of a problem for Rocket. You see, he's not the mascot. He's not even the mascot's sidekick. Rocket is the fixit droid for the guy who made the mascot's theme park. Luigi is the mascot's sidekick. Tails is the mascot's sidekick. Both Luigi and Tails have some small bit of notariety because they're at least the poor, underused flunky that the mascot can call on. But poor Rocket is so far out of the pecking order, I'd be surprised if, barring this Jojo incident, he'd even be allowed out in public at the grand opening of Wally World tomorrow. So you can understand why Rocket would jump at the task to take on a greater role. He's the Toad of Wally World, forever doomed in a supporting role, forever hoping for the spotlight. No more will he be satisfied with, "Thank you for rescuing me! But our princess is in another castle!"
Wally World, of course, is the hub area, and you can more or less travel all over it from the beginning of the game. You can't get into the rides (aka, the "lands") until you collect enough tickets for the repair guy (I forgot his name, but it's really not that important) to open up the ride for you. So really, it's a matter of collecting tickets, opening up new areas, and collecting more tickets ‚ pretty standard platform stuff.
The gameplay: Rocket only ever gets a few abilities in the game, and so once you get used to him, there's no major shifts to how he behaves (he never learns how to fly, he never transforms himself into a battlemech, etc. etc.), just marginal improvements to what he's already got. Samus never got really big improvements either; Rocket is much the same way. He learns a double jump, gets a longer grapple beam, get a short range ice ray, and learns how to slam whatever he's carrying into the ground, which is the only way you can defeat enemies. So clearly, the game is not about turning Rocket into an enemy thrashing hellspawn.
Actually, that's really the main difference between Rocket and any other platformer I've encountered. There's only a very few enemies in the entire game, and you can pretty much kill all of them without any trouble. The game is not about fighting, its more about using what you've got and figuring out puzzles. You get no reward for fighting (there are no tickets guarded by bosses) beyond energy, which you lose when they hit you only if it's a type of monster that can even cause you harm. Some enemies simply block you or interfere with your efforts, but otherwise have no offensive capabilities. That takes about as much getting used to as Rocket's movement. Let me stress this point: There are no boss fights. No cinematics where the boss taunts you, no bombastic fight music, no glorious death sequence for your defeated foe. None of the stages have a boss at all.
Of course, the game does have to adhere to some platformer standards. Rocket has to pick up tickets to open new worlds, and repair tokens to learn new abilities. You also get a ticket for getting all the repair tokens per world. Think of them as stars and coins, and you'll get the gist perfectly. Rocket also has to find parts of the main level theme, something that Jojo broke. Once you get all the parts together, a portion of the level is activated, and you get a ticket. The tickets are awarded to you for performing various tasks, and this is where the game really outshines the competition ‚ you generally have to think your way through puzzles more than you have to jump and race for them (not to say that there aren't jumping and racing puzzles, but they're the minority). Let me give you two examples.
The first world you get to is a Boardwalk Carnival world. There's a beach, which has a sand buggy race on it, and the boardwalk itself, which has midway games (mostly tests of your throwing skill) and a few carnival like attractions (the very bizarre house of bees and a robot dinosaur). However, the most fun puzzle in the level is designing your own roller coaster. You have to build a roller coaster which will carry Rocket through 5 checkpoints. If you get them all, you get the ticket for that puzzle. Like any roller coaster, you have some options whether to build up, down, make a speed up corkscrew or a plain flat track, and the previous pieces have a lot of bearing on the next piece. Corkscrews are longer than flat tracks, and typically force you to build down after you place one, but you need to place these in order to reach checkpoints that are otherwise unaccessible. It's very clever, and it's quite enjoyable to ride around in, plus, you were actually encouraged to add something to the stage, as opposed to just blowing through, picking up the goodies you need to take, and leaving the rest of the world as the designer saw fit to make it for you.
The other example I have for you is from the Roman World. Yes, part of Wally World is set in ancient Rome, complete with plaster Centurion Wally statues. You even get to ride in a hover chariot. Most of the stages in Rocket have some sort of vehicle associated with it; the Hover Chariot is by far the most amusing because it can throw paint. So you can fly around the stage and paint all the Wally statues whatever color you like. There are several puzzles associated with this ability, but by far and large, the most fun is painting the stage random colors. The most intricate puzzle on the stage is painting yourself. One of the tickets is guarded by a centurion robot who has an orange shirt and a green kilt. In order to get past him, he has to think you're one of his legion. There are pools of paint nearby, and you can either wade in the entire way, or just soak your bottom half. In order to solve the puzzle, Rocket has to paint himself matching colors from the blue, yellow, red, and green pools. Notice how I didn't say orange. Also, you can't just paint your top half, you have to paint yourself entirely or just the bottom half. You can clean the paint off of yourself from another pool. I won't spoil the rest of it, just realize that the puzzle is one of experimentation. Plus, if you like, after you solve the puzzle, you can paint Rocket whatever color you like and run around like that for the rest of the stage.
Rocket has some of the most cleverly themed stages, and it's all in large part due to the fact that, being a theme park, the stages can be entirely unreal. I've mentioned the Boardwalk and Roman world; there's a mine shaft, a horror candy-land, an Arabian magic carpet setting, a cloud world, and a few others. You don't get any generic grasslands or deserts here.
If the game has a weakness, it's in Rocket's handling. The tasks themselves would be clever but simple if Mario was doing them, but Mario is far more agile than Rocket. Rocket's sort of gimpy. He's got a rather poor jump, he accelerates too fast to negotiate the tight corners he sometimes has to, and the rolling can really be frustrating when you've spent so much effort to get Rocket to where he needs to be, just to have him clumsily slip off thanks to gravity. It's not a fatal flaw; it was purposefully designed into Rocket, but if you find yourself screaming at Mario for being a clumsy dumbass, be warned, Rocket is a lot harder on you to control.
Using Rocket's grapple beam is also a little touchy; there are several times where you have to grab on to floating pegs and swing to the next peg. Mercifully, Rocket automatically orients in the direction of the next hand hold, so you'll never miss the direction that Rocket needs to swing in. What you will miss is the button that lets go of the previous peg and catches on to the next ‚ Rocket's grapple beam has a recharge time, and if you let go too late, you won't be able to grab the next page before you fly past it. If you let go too early, you won't have enough momentum to carry you close enough to the next page to grab it. It's frustrating, and I can't beat the last stage of the game because it relies on these abilities entirely too much, and it's often the only thing that gets poor Rocket killed.
The aesthetics: A weakness of the game that probably drove most people away from it are its graphics. Rocket himself is fairly well done, and the worlds are nice, but the graphics are generally flat. Boulders look like rough hewn polygons, even though they move very realistically, and tumble against each other convincingly enough. The worlds are bright and eye-pleasing enough, but if you soil yourself over gorgeous water ripples and shadowing effects, you're in for a bitter disappointment; this game hardly bothers with special effects. Essentially, the graphics are serviceable, but not impressive.
The sound is, more or less, the same way. The ham and eggs keyboard synth gets a little overused, and the music, while peppy enough, becomes white noise because there's so little variety in it. Rocket makes enough noise, and his "Yeowch!" sound effect sounds convincing enough when he gets nailed by something, but nobody else in the game makes a lot of noise. Jojo just has a cackling chitter, the repair robot that gives Rocket new abilities simply says, "Hmm?" and the professor type guy has a "Hmm!" of his own. Rocket doesn't otherwise interact with anybody else in the game. By the time you're done with a level, you're more or less done looking at and listening to it as much as you are done picking up all the tickets.
Final thoughts: It'd be a shame if you overlook this title based on its appearances. The point of Rocket is about novelty, and gorgeous platformers with a well-known mascot character picking up easily accessible doodads has been done. Rocket is about an ill-equipped loser struggling with basic motor skills, attempting to winkle its way through puzzles and skill trials. Rocket never gets very powerful, nor particularly agile or even adept, meaning, from start to finish (or, in my case, as close as I could come to the finish), you struggle with your own limitations as much as you do with the novelty of puzzles. Compared to subsequent platformers which were all about getting new abilities which merely let you access areas with more collectable crap in them, I thought it was refreshing to have a hero who had to make do with what it could do. Rocket: Robot on Wheels is more of a test of your abilities, not the mascot's, making it a much tougher game, but a much more satisfying experience. 12.25.02 / 06:13AM / Boris |
