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Rocket - Robot on Wheels Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
Rocket: Robot On Wheels suprises, a sleeper hit for sure.
Nintendo have a lot to thank Ubisoft for. They are one of the few developers who have stuck with the N64 through thick and thin releasing such hits as Tonic Trouble, Rayman 2 and now, the sleeper hit of the year, Rocket: Robot On Wheels. A relatively unknown game for new development house Sucker Punch, Rocket: Robot On Wheels has burst onto the market and stunned everyone into amazement. How did Ubisoft keep this cracker so quiet?
It's the day before the grand opening of a brand new fully-automated leisure park called Whoopee World, which is named after the park's central attraction, a good-natured walrus, called Whopee naturally. Having worked hard getting the park ready for the public, the manager of the place has nipped off for a well-earned rest leaving his deputy in charge - a little robot called Rocket. Almost before the manager has left, disaster strikes! Jo Jo - a mammal of indeterminate lineage and the park's other, less popular mascot - kidnaps Whoopee and spirits him away into the darkest recesses of the complex, disrupting all the automated systems along the way. This leaves Rocket with just a few hours to rescue Whoopee and fix all the park machines before the big opening, and that's where you take over. With nothing but your wits and a rather nifty little tractor beam which lets you pick up, drop and throw most objects, you've got to fix all the problems in the park and track down Jo Jo.
The game itself seems very simplistic at first. Rocket must travel through various worlds collecting tickets that have been scattered around the amusement park, which open up new areas. He must also collect tokens that unlock new abilities and tickets, as well as machine parts, which activate numerous contraptions located throughout the game. Using a handy energy grapple beam, Rocket can pick up just about any object. Once players have an object in their beam, they can meticulously plan where they want to throw it, set it down, or use it. A throwing marker even pops up that illustrates exactly where each object will land once it is thrown. This works wonderfully, playing an integral part in the adventure. But this general description of things to do hardly serves the game justice as there is so much more.
Each of the game's seven worlds features several sub-levels, mini-games and challenges. There are vehicles that must be utilized properly with environments. There are objects that must be combined with other objects for a specific effect. There are tricky puzzles that need solving. There are machines that must be built and then conquered. And all of this is held together with a philosophy that positions environments -- not Rocket -- as the primary focus of the game.
At first glance Rocket appears, aesthetically at least, to be very similar to the Rare hit Banjo-Kazooie. This isn't actually a bad thing because Banjo looked gorgeous, but as titles such as 40 Winks have proved just because a game looks great that doesn't necessarily mean that it plays great too. Fortunately,Rocket does. It's safe to say that it plays at least as well as Banjo and in fact we'd even go so far as to say that in many ways it's actually better than the Rare title. This is solely down to the gameplay - Rocket has it by the truckload.
The physics engine, meanwhile, is one of the most amazing technical achievements in a Nintendo 64 game to date. Every object in the title has its very own, extraordinarily realistic weight and feel. Sucker Punch, taking full advantage of this fact, has designed objects to work in conjunction with one another in a puzzle-esque manner. In the past, many games have claimed to have 'realistic physics' only to fall down when it actually comes to delivering on the pre-launch hype. Rocket, though, is a game which give you everything that it promises. Every physical object in the game behaves as you would expect it to in real life. Throw a rock and it rolls just like a real one. Pile boxes on top of one another and they sway and wobble, and often fall unless you pile them correctly.
The second thing which is superb about Rocket is the variety of the puzzles. These range from games of skill to mental challenges and include painting objects different colours to solve problems and playing Tic-Tac-Toe with a chicken! With so many other games, the so-called puzzles are often limited to simply pressing switches and opening doors, so it's a refreshing change to actually find a game which taxes you mentally instead of just wearing out your fingers on the joypad.
Rocket's graphic calibur isn't quite as impressive as Rare's Banjo-Kazooie, but it's certainly pretty all the same. The game features an off-the-wall combination of 1920s-like amusement park environments, delightfully rich, colorful textures (in some levels, and just the opposite in others) and simplistic polygon models. The framerate is generally very smooth and the detail level, admittedly not as striking as Rayman 2, is very impressive. Developer Sucker Punch has sometimes sacrificed background detail for raw fluidity, which is admirable. The fade-in of backgrounds is not so bothersome, especially when compared to the alternative: a poor framerate.
Rocket: Robot On Wheels is a fantastic game which should give gamers many hours of fun. Rocket: Robot On Wheels is easily one of Nintendo 64's most innovative, original, deep, and utterly brilliant platformers to date. It's a game that is clever in a way that so many games aren't. It's a game that challenges players with a seemingly never-ending variety of unique, satisfying puzzles and mini-adventures. learning curve has been well judged so that while you'll be able to breeze through the first world fairly easily, by the time you get to the final level you're going to find that your joypad skills are being taxed to the limit. Rocket is a step back to the future, for all the right reasons. It relies on gameplay, and not graphics, even though it's graphics are great.
