Rocketmen: Axis of Evil Hands-on
Capcom's latest action romp is set to make its way online this fall.
by
Chris Roper
April 13, 2007 - At Capcom's Gamers Day 2007 in San Francisco last night, the publisher and developer made a big point to talk about how promising the downloadable game space is and its success with games like Street Fighter II on Xbox Live. The company aims to ramp up its support for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network throughout the year with existing, licensed and new IPs. One of the new titles that the company is bringing to both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network is Rocketmen: Axis of Evil.
The game is a top-down action title that is something of a mix of an old-school stage crawler with Robotron controls. That is, you're given independent control over movement and shooting with the left and right analog sticks, and you advance through levels while plowing through countless numbers of unnamed soldiers. The setup is classic arcade goodness on a stick, though we're not quite sold on it yet.
Big space dogs will tear you apart.
The mechanics are only slightly more complicated than the use of two analog sticks. The right trigger will use a special pickup, be it a mine that turns into a turret or small electrical field, while the left trigger will swap between weapons that you pick up. There are tons of pickups scattered around the game, though each of them has a finite number of ammo assigned to it with no additional ammo pickups in sight (at least that we saw). These advanced weapons may be particle beams, three-way shots or something else of the sort. When these run out, you're back to your trusty (and weak) laser rifle.
The game looks to take place entirely in space aboard enemy vessels that you board and attempt to conquer. The story is told through cell-shaded, still cutscenes that somewhat resemble a comic book, what with talk bubbles and such. While the cell shaded art in the gameplay portion of the title works on a simplistic level, the still frames of the cutscenes are hopefully works in progress as they're not very appealing to the eye.
The level that we tried has us run through a spaceship of some sort and gun down an endless onslaught of peons. Everyone's shots move at a slow pace, so dodging single shots is easy, but the screen can fill up with enough bullets that it's easy to have you health ticked away quickly if you're not careful. In the middle of the stage we had battle with a mini-boss, a robot, spinning contraption that fired electrical charges our way while soldiers filled the room. Taking it out required that we first destroyed a number of small guns around its spinning base, and then fire into the newly-made holes to take out the machine itself.
While the setup to the game is very much inspired by old-school arcade games, what we saw didn't have a whole lot of original style to it. In other words, it felt a little drab and dry. We're hoping that all the pieces aren't quite in place yet and that the excitement level will pick up towards release.
Shoot the glowing things.
One cool element about the game is that up to four players can lay waste to nameless soldiers both online and offline. Players can hop in and out at will, allowing for a quick sessions with friends in the middle of your single-player campaign run. Before you start, though, you're able to customize your characters looks, race, abilities and so forth, which also is cool.
While Rocketmen: Axis of Evil does need a bit of work, the game is still a ways out from its fall release and hopefully the team will be able to put a good bit of polish on the game before it release.
[PS3] Rocketmen: Axis of Evil Hands-on
Linear Mode
