Consolation Prize

You generally know within the first few minutes of playing a game whether or not you like it, or even if you’re willing to persevere with it for a little bit longer just in case you missed that hidden gem of game-play that suddenly adds cohesion to the entire experience – but I’m afraid no such epiphany happened while playing through the trial game of RocketBowl.

The idea behind RocketBowl is quite appealing; take the familiarity of bowling, place it all in an open area with multiple “lanes”, an undulating landscape replete with obstacles, and add in the ability to give your ball a boost or fire it off in either a left or right direction by igniting a rocket. It sounds quite interesting in theory, but in practice, I’m sorry to say, we’re left with a fairly dull game.

Given 10 frames on the course you have three attempts to knock down all the pins of each frame in sequence to accumulate the highest score. It’s not essential to aim at the set of pins directly ahead, and in-fact you are free to launch in any direction - which is actively encouraged given that there are lots of points bonuses and power-ups dotted around the course. The only real requirement is that you hit some pins somewhere if you want to keep those extra points and avoid the shot being called a “miss”. It doesn’t feel however, like you can do a great deal to control the rocket ball. You’re only able to nominally apply some swerve and fire off the occasional rocket, thus, it feels like you’re more of a spectator than an active participant.

It’s unfortunate that on a checklist of “items to include in a game” most things are checked okay: the controls are nice and simple, the physics work well, and it looks pleasant, but what’s lacking in my opinion is long term interest. There’s nothing here that appealed beyond the first few minutes of game-play and even less that made me want to invest hours of my life into it, or more importantly for publishers - the desire for me to part with 800 Microsoft Points.

Maybe things improve with the full retail version and the trial game does it an injustice, or it could be that it’s much better when playing in a tournament with friends, but on the evidence presented here there’s no place for the game in my collection. Sorry Rocket Bowl.

RocketBowl is available from Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points (GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.30 / USD 10.00).

I did not even bother to download it because it did not seem like something I would spend any time playing. Guess I could be wrong, but with so many other great games out I did not want to waste time with this.

I think you made a wise choice Jigsaw, there are other games on XBLA that should be enjoyed first.