Boom Boom Rocket is the latest arcade offering from Bizarre Creations. You might know them as the developers who made a little game called, Geometry Wars; this little game is still the number one rated game on the Xbox live marketplace. With this latest arcade game, Bizarre decided to go musical. This game challenges you to set off fireworks, in time with the different musical tracks. Sound a little familiar, I know but if you haven’t jumped on the Guitar Hero bandwagon, keep reading, you might just want to give this one a chance.
Visuals & Sound
Visually this is game is beautiful! Each level starts off with a nice evening cityscape, after the countdown the fireworks start coming. As each one explodes, you are treated to a dazzling light show. If you have ever seen a real firework show, you know what to expect. You get the ones that blow up and release a shower of other ones that release another shower from them. You get different colors and different types for each and every note you hit. As you progress through each level, you will also receive a special display that is usually some type of character. Such as a dragon, pumpkin, even a playing card just to name a few.
Another neat thing that was included was the Visualizer mode. What this does is enable you to play your own music that you may have saved on your iPod, or hard drive and it will put on a firework show in tune to your music. It’s not really that impressive, but if you are tired of the usual visualizations that the 360 offers when it plays music it can be a nice change of pace.
The sound in this game is nothing really to get all excited about. As I mentioned in the last podcast, I was disappointed with the short selection of songs, but the ones that are included are not bad. It is pretty much techno versions of some old favorites, with new hyper titles such as, William Tell Overload, and Carmen Electric, and my favorite, Toccata and Funk. Some of the songs are kind of catchy and you will need to at least have the basic rhythm for them down if you want to be successful in this game. Outside of the music, you will hear the normal ’pops’ and ’cracks’ of fireworks.
Controls & Gameplay
Have you played Guitar Hero? Then you should have no problem with the controls in this game. Essentially, you are treated to colors (which are the same colors as your 360 face buttons-.imagine that?!) that come from the bottom of the screen. The goal is to hit the correct one as it passes the bar located at the top of the screen. Easy as pie, especially for those of you that can play Guitar Hero on Hard. The problem is that you will find this game WAY to easy and will end up getting bored before you finish the first song. For those of us that find $89.99 way too expensive to get our musical game fix, look no further than this game.
Achievements
Most of these achievements you pick up just by playing through the game on each difficulty level. The only one that will give you a challenge is getting the ’A’ rating on the hard songs. The problem is, if you want to get that rating, you have to get most of your notes perfect! Believe me it is very hard to achieve this on the hard difficulty.
Online Functionality
Downloadable content and leader boards. That’s it.
Verdict
As I said above, if you are looking for a good musical game and don’t want to spend 90 bucks, Boom Boom Rocket is worth checking out. In this slow time of game releases, this one will help you widdle away the time–. At least until May 16th.
