Rocketmen: Axis of Evil
I just downloaded and tried this demo from the Playstation Network. There's also an XBox 360 version.
It's a video game taken from a board game. It was programmed with the Torque Game Engine, which is a very inexpensive development system from Garage Games. It's great that Torque is a full-featured game engine with a small price tag that has the ability to make games for the 360 and PS3. However, Rocketmen is not a game that makes "democratization of game development" (as we call it in the industry) encouraging.
It's a double-joystick shooter that has some extra elements like secondary weapons and a weapon customization system. It has a story that is present in a 3-d pseudo-comic book fashion. The basic idea for the game isn't the problem; it's the execution.
The voice acting is very amateurish; it sounds like someone got their friends into the studio. Perhaps it's more a fault of direction than acting, but either way it comes off very stiff. I started skipping the scenes after seeing about 5 of them as they were too stilted and interrupted the flow of the game too much.
The feel of the game itself rather poor, as well. It feels like a cheaply produced web-browser game. There doesn't seem to be a proper balance between the speed your character moves and the speed of your enemies' shots. The automatic camera/level advance system often leaves me unable to collect items my enemies have dropped.
After completing the two levels of the demo, I've seen enough. I don't recommend that anyone actually pay the $10 for the full version. As I write this, I feel it's a rather harsh judgement since I remember being a bedroom game developer. I feel justified though because my stuff may not have looked any more professional, but it was certainly a hell of a lot more fun.
It's a video game taken from a board game. It was programmed with the Torque Game Engine, which is a very inexpensive development system from Garage Games. It's great that Torque is a full-featured game engine with a small price tag that has the ability to make games for the 360 and PS3. However, Rocketmen is not a game that makes "democratization of game development" (as we call it in the industry) encouraging.
It's a double-joystick shooter that has some extra elements like secondary weapons and a weapon customization system. It has a story that is present in a 3-d pseudo-comic book fashion. The basic idea for the game isn't the problem; it's the execution.
The voice acting is very amateurish; it sounds like someone got their friends into the studio. Perhaps it's more a fault of direction than acting, but either way it comes off very stiff. I started skipping the scenes after seeing about 5 of them as they were too stilted and interrupted the flow of the game too much.
The feel of the game itself rather poor, as well. It feels like a cheaply produced web-browser game. There doesn't seem to be a proper balance between the speed your character moves and the speed of your enemies' shots. The automatic camera/level advance system often leaves me unable to collect items my enemies have dropped.
After completing the two levels of the demo, I've seen enough. I don't recommend that anyone actually pay the $10 for the full version. As I write this, I feel it's a rather harsh judgement since I remember being a bedroom game developer. I feel justified though because my stuff may not have looked any more professional, but it was certainly a hell of a lot more fun.
posted by Almo at 10:29 PM
1 Comments:
That's pretty much consistent with my view of the demo, although I think I got a little more from the presentation (retro, Flash-Gordon-esque sci-fi being a real draw for me).
I get the feeling that all the mechanics to make the game fun (if not particularly original) are present, just requiring of a little more tweaking, if the player ran a little quicker, the enemy shots a little slower and the 'restriction' of movement (the camera based progression issue) was better motivated it would be of a higher order than it is now.
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