How do they keep cranking out games? I swear I’m reviewing a Halfbrick title every two weeks (I’ve been slacking and there’s two this week and really it’s more like every month or so).
Alright, here we go race fans. Time to strap on your rockets, grind (drift) off the curves and zoom to the finish in Halfbrick’s Rocket Racing.
At times, I really hate this game. The rocket floats so damned much that it’s nearly impossible to control and manage. There’s no steering sensitivity on the game which means that you’re stuck with what you’ve got which is beyond irritating at times. It’s not fun when you can’t control the vehicle that you’re given causing you not be able to actually do what it set forth for you to accomplish.
The game has so far had me swearing, profusely, and on the verge of chucking the controller across the 
room. Yes, I’m still playing it but it’s not exactly enjoyable all of the time. Sometimes it really shines and other times it’s so uncontrollable that you just want to give up.
At other times the game is great fun. How can it be so bi-polar? It has to do with the controls I think. A standard racer has steering, Rocket Racing has floating about with vector thrust. Doing vector thrust equations in your head is beyond most of us and often, we’ll screw it up. That translates into running into the wall, spinning your rocket in the wrong direction or generally some other form of frustration.
So why am I still playing? Partly because I have to and partly because I think I can overcome it. Some of the levels just seem malicious by design. For example you’re given a small amount of time to do something and then penalized one second for each time you crash into
the wall. So that small time that you started with shrinks constantly if you can’t control your vehicle.
In some levels you’re penalized twice for running into the wall. You lose both a second of time and any points you had been accruing for the grind. That just seems downright evil because many times I’ve finished a levels with one of two goals (time and points) because of it.
And the vehicle is very hard to control. A millisecond too much thrust and you’re in the wall. A millisecond too much turn, and you’re spun out. All the vehicles are exactly the same (aside from color) and there’s no sensitivity adjustment on the controls. Hypothetically speaking, a vehicle should be able to be customized to its driver as not all drivers are the same. This game forces you to use a one-size-fits-all control setup and as we all know, one size certainly does not fit all.
Games that require absolutely perfection in order to proceed are no game at all. They’re simply an exercise in futility. You know a game has some issues when the developer puts a quick reset button in place. What that tells me is that you will play a level over and over and over ad nauseum. Not exactly what I want from my gaming experience.
The graphics and sound in the game are what we’ve come to expect from Halfbrick titles. They’re there and do the job. Nothing too fancy or over the top. The tracks have a sufficiently cool futuristic look to them and the sounds complete the atmosphere. But there’s nothing so outstanding that I could point to it specifically. The music is a fairly generic futuristic electronic drone that one tends to block out while playing.
All in all, the game does have its good points. With some minor tweaking and perhaps less penalties for not being perfect it could be a great, unique, racing game. But when it makes me so angry that I throw my PSP, well, there’s just something wrong with that. Games are supposed to be fun and when I finish playing a game I want to feel relaxed. Sometimes when I finish playing this game I want to scream.
