The Life of an Ex-Hardcore Gamer

Avatar Rockets is the latest Xbox Live Indie Game to use Avatars, even if you can barely tell.  In the end it was used to get it’s game more recognized which was a smart thing to do.  The game is extremely fun and simple to play, but may not be for everyone.

Avatar Rockets is a simple game in many senses of the word.  The graphics are just basic outlined shapes with solid colors and a “sketch” look to it with some minor shading.  The sound is of a rocket engine and some music.  The controls are the right trigger and pressing left and right on the analog stick.  And the goal?  Well, it’s to get as high as you can before running out of fuel.  Despite all this simplicity, this game just “works.”

After you load the game up you can launch right into the game using 1 of 12 premade rockets or you can use the in game “Rocket Paint” mode to create your own rocket design.  After that it’s 3…2…1… BLAST OFF, pull the right trigger for some rocket throttle and start going upward.  It uses the right trigger so you can ease up off of it and not have to go full blast all the time and you’re going to want to do this because the trick to a high score is making sure you do not waste fuel.  As you get to a certain point you will find more fuel to collect in the sky but you have to maneuver around to get them.  It’s a rocket after all so don’t expect to just hit left and you go right do it, you’re going to to be steering with thrust in mind.  It will definitely take a few tries to get used to it, but once you do then you will be playing round after round trying to be more fuel efficient and grabbing all those power ups to get higher and higher.  As you get higher up you will also run into monkeys that will fly at you.  If they latch onto your rocket they will make the controls backwards and therefore harder to hit the fuel power up.  Also, if you miss a fuel power up you have to go back, the next one does not appear until you collect the previous so you can’t just keep going and hope to get the next.  It may not sound like much fun, but this is a leaderboard driven game.

That’s right, I said leaderboards.  Despite this game being an XBLI game, it has online leaderboards which I did not even think was possible.  The game should be commended for this fact alone, especially for a game that’s so score based (When is the last time you played I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES?), but they went multiple steps ahead to keep the game an even better experience.  You see, instead of just having you see your score afterwards and then seeing a leaderboard, you will actually see the name and rank of someone as you are flying by their height in game much like in Trials HD.  You will have an immediately knowledge of beating someone’s score or just how close you were to beating it making you want to play again to try and get passed that score (and the next, and the next…).  This is genius for any game, let alone one that is made in a category of games that never have leaderboards.  If you have friends with the game they have a separate leaderboard for that and you will even have your top friend score always on screen so you have a goal to shoot for.

Not satisfied with just leaderboards the makers of Avatar Rockets also added Xbox Live Party play.  You select whether you would like to do a Best of Five mode where players have 5 attempts to post their highest score, To the Moon where the player with the highest combined score after 5 attempts wins, or 54 Stars mode where the players have unlimited fuel and it’s a race to see who can be the first to collect 54 stars before anyone else.  Once picking a mode you can then choose to find a game or create a private game.  I have not had any success just finding a random game in this, but that is to be expected for something also niche as this, but I was able to coordinate with a friend.  While it supports up to 8 players, we just did the two of us in all 3 modes and had a lot of fun.  You do not see your friend(s) playing, you just do what your goal is while they are doing it and you can see their score on your screen while you play.  If you crash and burn before they are done you will be told to wait and still see their score go up.  Even in this instance you still do not see them playing, just their score.  While fun for a short time, I found that the game’s strong point was to just play single player and shoot for a higher score, and I’m sure others feel the same way and that is why you’ll never really find anyone to play online.

The music in the game is rather well done too.  It’s a piano driven rock song that is high quality and not repetitive enough to get annoying which is good since you’ll be hearing it a lot while playing over and over.  Sure it may get to you after a while, but you can always just throw another tune on from your hard drive or network.  Considering the small file size it’s more than other games give.  The graphics as I mentioned before are a sketch style and it works great for the game.  Your Avatar is in fact piloting the ship, but most of the time you’ll barely see him or her since they are so small and it’s really not much of a factor, but as I said, I’m sure it gained more curiosity downloads that way.

3.5/5 Stars – A simple and fun Indie game with some features not found in other indie games that will keep you playing round after round, if even only in short bursts.  Only 80 points ($1) so a great value and highly recommended.  Click here to go to the official Xbox.com page for it and add it to your download queue.