Boom Boom Rocket is fun while it lasts, but you can't help but feel like you're buying half of a game for 800 points.
The premise is a simple one. Although never actually explained, you are in charge of detonating fireworks in time with remixed takes on classic music. There is a line near the top of the game's display that acts as your target detonation area. Rockets that are colour coded to the Xbox 360's face buttons will be launched automatically by the game. The closer you detonate the rockets to the target line, the more points you will get, and the more your combo meter will fill. Miss too many rockets, and your combo meter will empty, prompting you to fail the stage.
Once you have completely filled your combo meter, you can hit one of the trigger buttons to trigger a short 16X bonus mode. The bonus mode is best saved for busy parts of the song that have rapid-fire rocket detonations.
The default display option also puts directional arrows on the rockets to assist you in finding the right button. If you've ever played a Dance Dance Revolution game with a regular controller before, this will look and feel very familiar. The arrow option can be turned off though, and in my case it actually made the game easier because I didn't have to process as much information.
The Standard Game mode is made up of ten songs, each with three levels of difficulty. The game's challenge is not without substance. Easy mode is a good way to get acquainted with the songs. Normal introduces two-button detonations and fills in more of the song than Easy. Hard mode will give even veteran rhythm game players a good run for their money, and cause some serious helmet fire to the average player.
I'll note at this time that the game can apparently be played with the Dance Dance Revolution Universe Dance Pad, though I don't have one so I can't confirm for sure.
The songs themselves are modernized remakes of classic, public domain music like The William Tell Overture and Moonlight Sonata. Most of the songs take on a mid 90's cheese techno-rave feel like those in the Dance Dance Revolution series. So you'll love it, hate it or just grin and bear it because you like the game play. The audio production is well done, but the real problem is that there's only ten songs to play through.
Presumably more songs will be made available for download, but that's obviously going to cost more money. An average rhythm game has about 30 songs in it. If the pricing is anything like the Guitar Hero 2 content, it could add up quite quickly on top of the initial 800 Microsoft Points ($10 USD), thus making Boom Boom Rocket a dubious value for anyone that's not up to the challenge or already into rhythm games.
The game's value is padded a bit by an Endurance Mode that starts a song at it's regular tempo, and gradually speeds it up as you do laps around the one city backdrop you will see the entire time you play the game. Again, this is an obvious intentional shortcoming that can be remedied with downloadable content. Even after ten minutes with the game, I wanted some new backgrounds.
Practice Mode seems pretty useless really, but it's there if you want it. There's also a more laid back Freestyle mode that is great for kids or rhythmically challenged friends. A real missed opportunity in my eyes is a playable version of the game's Visualizer Mode. This fires rockets in time with music stored on your Hard Drive using beat matching similar to a software audio player plug-in. Letting you play this mode would literally add infinite replay value to the game. There is also a multi player option, but it not online. Only two-player local competitions in the Endurance Mode.
There are some obvious graphical comparisons to be made to the PlayStation 2 launch title Fantavision. In fact, it looks like a slightly shiner version of that game which is now about seven years old. The aforementioned cityscape simply dull. The textures are almost non-existent and the water is not much better than what you'd see in a PlayStation 2 or GameCube game. The game's personality comes from the fireworks themselves. As you progress through each song and difficulty level, you'll unlock new patterns that will appear from time to time during game play. The explosions are technically unimpressive, look a bit jagged and blurry close up on HDTV displays and even caused some brief slowdown at points in the game.
There are twenty patterns in all, unlocked by beating the game's ten songs on the Easy and Medium difficulty levels. It's nice that the developers gave the average player a chance to unlock the content but aside from a lone achievement, there really isn't much reason for the less-than-hardcore players to spend any time with the Hard Mode at all.
As with all Xbox Live Arcade games, there are customizable leaderboards to see how you stack up against other players. I found it nice that the game sends you directly to the leaderboards after a completed single player round instead of having to check manually.
If you have an Xbox 360, 800 points and a penchant for rhythm games, you'll probably enjoy Boom Boom Rocket for the few hours it takes you to beat it and collect your 200 achievement points. It's not an ugly game, but it's not pretty either. The generic music sounds good, but there's not enough of it. Boom Boom Rocket is fun while it lasts, but you can't help but feel like you're buying half of a game.
-- Brian J. Papineau