[Review] Rocket Arena

[R e i]

Rocket Arena Game Informations

Developer:Final Strike Games
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Platform:Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Xbox One
Release    July 14, 2020
Genre:Third-person shooter Hero shooter

 

 

The rocket launcher is one of the most recognizable weapons in multiplayer shooters. From Quake to Team Fortress, its function as a weapon morphed into an alternative means of traversal, with the risk of a self-inflicted death and the reward of superior map positioning enticing players to become proficient at rocket jumping. In Rocket Arena, both the rocket launcher and rocket jumping are core to the action. But without suitably satisfying shooting and the mitigation of all the rewards associated with its core mechanic, Rocket Arena lacks a compelling and lasting appeal. Rocket Arena features a roster of 10 playable characters, each equipped with their own version of a rocket launcher and some auxiliary abilities. The variations go from basic, such as Jayto's straight-shooting launcher and multi-missile secondary attack, to complicated, like Kayi's ability to speed up friendly rockets and slow down enemy ones. Whether you settle on the lobbed rockets of space pirate Blastbeard or the trickster abilities of mage Mysteen, Rocket Arena's characters all feature enough mechanical variety to make them stand out from each other despite all featuring the same type of main weapon. Their cartoonish designs and bursting costume colors look great, but their uninteresting backstories and few voice-lines limit the extent of their personalities.These weapon and ability differences feed into the 3v3 team play in each of Rocket Arena's competitive modes. A team cannot feature duplicates of a character, so you're encouraged to work around the selections of your teammates. Although the very brief and basic tutorial doesn't teach you about it, attacks can be combined between characters to form more powerful combos. Ability effects can be transferred onto rockets fired by teammates, for example, but attempting to coordinate both the timing and positioning for such a move is often not worth the payoff.Instead, Rocket Arena feels best when you're playing it as a regular, run-of-the-mill team-based shooter. The freedom of movement afforded by each character's triple jump lets you stay in the air and nimbly maneuver around more than having your feet on the ground, letting you dodge incoming projectiles and fire off attacks from any direction. The frenetic nature of the action combines well with the absence of traditional health bars; Rocket Arena adopts a system like that of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, where each player has a bar that builds up when hit. The fuller the meter, the harder each hit will feel, with a well-placed shot on a player with a full bar knocking them out of the arena for a short time.Your rockets, along with those of your teammates, won't damage you, letting you experiment with the timing for rocket jumps without ending up as a mess on the floor. Chaining together shots against an adjacent wall also helps you hop vertically up it, which can mean the difference between respawning or not if you find yourself off the map. But while Rocket Arena makes the skill shot almost trivially easy to pull off, it also doesn't give you many reasons to use it. Where other shooters reward the risk of a rocket jump with the advantage of map position, Rocket Arena's map layouts and liberal vertical character movement render it almost meaningless in moment-to-moment play. Rocket jumps are still satisfying to pull off, but without any advantage to them there's no reason to perform them.

 

 

Matches are therefore mostly straightforward and one-note, not encouraging the use of complex strategies to win. The different game modes break up the monotonous action to an extent, with Rocket Arena collecting all of them under its single Arena playlist. Here you play through a handful of common multiplayer match types, including deathmatch, point control, and a rocket-ball spin on capture the flag. None stand out as particularly exciting and don't capitalize on the rocket-based shooting in any fun or novel ways. Outside of Arena, Rocket Arena offers a straight deathmatch playlist, Ranked Arena play, and a forgettable cooperative wave survival mode.Rocket Arena mixes traditional character progression and some of the trappings from free-to-play shooters, including cosmetic items up for purchase via microtransactions and a season pass with additional in-game unlocks. New characters are promised for each new season of competitive play, all of which will be free to all players too. It also features standard character progression, with additional cosmetics such as alternative skins, banners, and more locked behind each character's individual level. Items that influence gameplay cannot be purchased, and only a handful of skins require either real-world money or a large portion of the in-game currency you earn while playing. Passive character perks are unlocked irrespective of individual character levels, and can be shared between characters too. They don't make a large enough impact on gameplay to make new players feel at a disadvantage, but they are good rewards for sticking to the character you like to play as most.Rocket Arena's approach to being a more approachable shooter, from its colorful, whimsical characters to its forgiving rocket launcher mechanics, makes it easy to appreciate at first glance. Its frenetic mix of explosive-based shooting and easy-to-understand character abilities let you start having fun fast, but its lack of depth and uninteresting modes don't maintain the momentum. Rocket Arena undermines its main rocket-jumping hook by making the strategy meaningless amongst its other mechanics, and its shooting grows stale in the process. There's limited fun to be had with its frenetic and fast shooting action, but it's lacking strong lasting appeal.Electronic Arts put out a new PlayStation 4 game earlier this week and there's a pretty good chance you never even knew it existed. Rocket Arena is a 3v3 online multiplayer experience seemingly designed for the younger Fortnite crowd that takes Quake’s rocket jump and designs a game around it. That may be a pretty cool concept, but a questionable pricing structure will stop this one from hitting the mainstream.Rocket Arena borrows heavily from the likes of Overwatch with 10 different heroes to choose from, each packing their own abilities and weapon. Unlockable artefacts containing stat boosts can be used to customise a character and make them your own, and then it's time to sample the game's four modes. Team Deathmatch is a mainstay while Rocketball, Treasure Hunt, and Mega Rocket supply objectives to focus on. No matter what the main task is, however, you'll always find yourself rocket jumping about the place and lining up projectiles to ensure they collide with their designated target. The modes themselves are all completely competent in their own right, but there's not enough here to support more than a few hours of fun. Rocket jumping and blasting an opponent into the sky always comes with a quick dose of satisfaction, but the overall experience starts to wear thin much quicker than we were expecting.The game will also struggle to maintain a significant player base at a price of £24.99/$29.99. Rocket Arena would have had a much better shot at success as a free-to-play title, especially so when it launches with a store already packing a premium currency. Skins, cosmetic patterns, and return trails — you know the drill by now. However, perhaps the most audacious aspect of it all is that players are currently being asked to pre-order a Battle Pass.

 

 

I wish it weren't so hard to find a mellow multiplayer shooter. All of my current favorites are hyper-competitive tactical games that tense up my entire body. I want more of the opposite—a laid-back shooter that goes down so smooth that eight matches can fly by before I know it. That’s definitely not what I thought I was getting into with Rocket Arena, a shooter that presents itself like yet another contender in an increasingly crowded pile of hero-based service games. It kind of is one of those, but it's also a throwback to when shooters weren't so cutthroat.With a name like Rocket Arena, you might expect something similar to the original Quake mod, but the resemblance ends at rockets. This is a team-based shooter that's really obsessed with those classic fire-propelled projectiles. Final Strike Games has essentially deconstructed the rocket launcher and crafted a tasting menu of its various interpretations. Not every hero shoots literal rockets, but the spirit of rockets is there throughout. Kayi’s crossbow? Sharp rockets with a long windup. Mysteen’s throwing cards? Magic bundles of burst-fire rockets. Boone's blunderbuss? Sniper rockets!Triple jumps and movement abilities make nailing that perfectly led shot a lot more challenging than it was in my Halo days. Instead of one-shot showdowns, Rocket Arena's weapons and abilities are tools to knock each other out of bounds. Taking continuous damage fills a meter that makes each subsequent hit knock you farther into the sky until you can't recover and get “megablasted” through the map barrier. It's basically Super Smash Bros’s knockout mechanic in a full 3D space, and it's a perfect fit for the lighthearted fun that Final Strike Games is going for. After being knocked out, you’re slowly floated back to a designated respawn point and back in the fight. It's a small detail, but staying with my character during these respites helped me learn maps faster and plan my next move from a bird's-eye view.There's a lot of great visual and audio feedback that sells its concussive rocket blasts without the need for blood squibs or meat chunks. Repeatedly hitting enemies plays rising musical notes that build the tension of a close fight. When you finally build their damage meter enough to score a megablast, you hear the intoxicating crack of a bat as they soar out of the map like you've hit a home run. I've gushed over Valorant’s post-kill violin stings and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's overpowering impact sounds, and this also releases the good brain chemicals.Combat is (slightly) deepened by unique secondary attacks, movement abilities, item pickups, and simple upgrades equipped out of game. The random item pickups can grant you a small speed boost or throwable bomb in a pinch, but they don't hand you the fight. Some movement abilities feel overpowered, like Rev's freeform flight ability that lets her quickly reposition in any direction or recover from a near-knockout better than anyone. Her mobility sticks out especially because it's so easy to get juggled by multiple enemies without a good chance of recovery. You can dodge rockets with a well-timed press of Q (again, very similar to air dodging in Super Smash Bros), but the cooldown is so long that it rarely feels useful. The entire combat dynamic could be more interesting with more skill-based ways to avoid fire. Right now, follow-up shots in midiar are so punishing that trying to recover feels like a waste of time. It's often faster to just fall out of bounds and reset.I dig how each of the 10 launch characters distinguish themselves in action, but on the whole, Rocket Arena looks forgettable. It has a cutesy fantasy-tech look that's starting to blend together into a lot of hero games. 

 

 Rocket Arena Minimum  Requirements
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Processor (AMD): Phenom X3 8650 or better
Processor (Intel): Core i3 or better
Memory: 4 GB
Graphics Card (AMD): Radeon HD 4850 or better
Graphics Card (Nvidia): GeForce GTX 460 or better
DirectX: 11 compatible video card or equivalent
Multiplayer Online Connection Requirements: Broadband internet connection
Hard Drive Space: 30 GB
Rocket Arena Recommended Requirements
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Processor (AMD): Phenom II X3 or better
Processor (Intel): Core i5 or better
Memory: 6 GB
Graphics Card (AMD): Radeon RX 480 or better
Graphics Card (Nvidia): GeForce GTX 1060 or better
DirectX: 11 compatible video card or equivalent
Multiplayer Online Connection Requirements: Broadband internet connection
Hard Drive Space: 30 GB