Review

Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Developer: Bizarre Creations
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Reviewed by Justin Fassino on 5.2.2007

Review Rating: 7/10

Music and rhythm games have developed a nice little quirk in the past couple years: they oftentimes connect the audio element to the visual one. Slowly are the lines between genres blending with synaesthetic experiences in game form. The newest title to implement the sensory confusion found in such games like Rez is from the creators of Geometry Wars. Boom Boom Rocket is a music game that uses the Xbox 360 controller's face buttons (or directional pad, if you prefer) to destroy the notes on-screen, causing incandescent explosions to flare before your eyes. And it's a very solidly-built game, too.

Boom Boom Rocket's 800-point cost will get you a number of things: several gameplay modes, 10 songs that are remixes and rearrangements of classical tunes everyone knows and loves, and a cool visualizer that will read music from your Xbox 360 HDD and create a fireworks show to the beat; you can also control the speed and viewing angle on it. Each stage takes place over a night-covered cityscape, and the camera will scroll, swoop, and swing during your illusory efforts. What's neat about the sweeping camera is that it allows for the musical notes (which take the role of fireworks) to appear from all angles on the screen. Most of the time they'll fly up from the bottom, but sometimes they'll already be halfway to the top of your view as the camera swings by on its tour of the metropolis.

As the notes fly upwards, your job will be to make them explode as they connect with a bar, which runs horizontally at the top of your screen. Each note will take the color and direction of one of the four face buttons on your controller and when detonated, will explode into a shower of colored sparks or patterns. Clearing each of the three difficulties (easy, normal, hard) for a given song will grant you a new firework design, which will randomly appear when you string together a nice chain of notes without making a mistake. These can take the form of animals, playing cards, or other fun shapes.

No music game would be complete without good songs, and BBR has 10 of them. As previously mentioned, they're all covers of famous classical pieces, with names to match: "1812 Overdrive" (Tchaikobsky's 1812 Overture), "Tail Light Sonata" (Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata"), and "Hall of the Mountain Dude" (Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King") among them. They're all upbeat with distinctly electronic stylings. The weakness here is that there are only 10, and you can fly through most of them on the normal or easy difficulties in less than an hour. It's a problem that prevents BBR from being played in long spurts; if Electronic Arts releases some downloadable content in the future, it would prolong the life of the game considerably. Still, for the price, 10 songs is quite appropriate for this title.

What's also neat about Boom Boom Rocket is the visual panache. With the classical music theme in full force, adding fireworks seems like a no-brainer. It's pretty easy to see the Geometry Wars influence here what with all the particle effects and graphical techniques being employed. It also means that the game is undeniably pretty; when you get all the different colored fireworks detonating at once during a particularly hectic part of a song, the game glows. To up the ante, there's also a gameplay mechanism whereby you can send yourself into hyper mode. Build up enough steam without missing a note to fill the combo bar at the top of the screen; once full, you can pull the L or R trigger and every firework you hit correctly will explode with twice the force in spectacular arrays that can occupy half the screen.

The other game modes are also fun, if not diverse. More creative players can find fun with the freestyle option, which plays the song and firework notes like normal, but leaves out the bar at the top of the screen, letting players create their own fireworks shows however they want, without worrying about scoring or those pesky rules. There's also a take on the regular mode called Endurance, which has you select a song and then play it while it gets gradually faster. Your goal is to rack up as many points and as many laps through the song as you can (it loops on itself at the end).

The interface is nice, too. After every round, you are taken directly to the Xbox Live leaderboards to see how your score and rank stack up against everyone else online. The menus are easy to navigate, and the overall package is very simple to use.

The two main things working against BBR that prevent it from being a must-buy are the short length and lack of online play. There is a two-player head-to-head mode, but it's limited to a single console. For some, the simplistic gameplay and lack of musical variety will be turn-offs. And those are all legitimate complaints. Boom Boom Rocket is still fun, however, and fans of rhythm games can find a lot to like with the package. The rest of you should give the demo a try before purchasing to find out if it lines up with your personal taste.

Boxart

Media

5.2.2007 - Screens (8)