Rocketmen: Axis of Evil

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil , available from Xbox Live Marketplace for 800 points, is a game that tries to play homage to the early comic book style of science fiction with finned rockets, Venusians and dastardly Martians.

The trial of this top-down action “dungeon crawler” style game starts off quite well allowing you to customise your characters traits such as the gender, race, class and clothing colour. Presentation wise it all looks quite good. Comic book style cut scenes with voiceovers are used to further the tongue-in-cheek storyline and the art design suits the retro Sci-Fi style of the game and could have been taken from a 1930’s episode of Flash Gordon.

The game is simple enough to play. Wade through the level shooting anything that moves while picking up the occasional time limited weapon upgrade such as a shotgun or laser cannon, with the aim of completing the primary mission objective.

However, there are some major flaws. Although the isometric backgrounds are decent enough the animation of the lead character is pretty poor as if only half the number frames have been drawn. Criminally as you move through the level you are cut off from returning to any previously trodden area unless it’s part of the level design, thus if you like to explore a level fully or return for pickups you are going to be disappointed. Finally the enemy AI, if you can call it that, isn’t anything special with the difficulty of the game induced by throwing swarms of mindless enemies at the player.

I really tried to like this game. The old retro Sci-Fi feel of the game provokes distant memories of watching black and white episodes of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but unfortunately the game is spoiled by its flaws and the gameplay is a little too bland for my tastes.