Rocky Artue Review

By Nacho Andrade, USA
for www.touchgen.com

Published: February 11, 2009

Rocky Artue is another entry into the iPhone platform game category. The game begins when Rocky (some sort of cyborg armadillo) finds a lead about his missing “father’s” whereabouts. Rocky escapes from Area 51 by shooting off into the night sky like a rocket. We discover his father is in some abandoned mine or something, Rocky gets into a mine cart, and the game goes downhill from there.

Before I get to what I didn’t like about Rocky Artue, let me tell you what I do like. I like the graphics. The art style is cool and have a very finished feel, it looks like a polished platformer you would expect to see on a console. The colors are bright, and the art is interesting.

The art and the intro music got me excited to play the game. You hear this wonderful dramatic movie style music in the menu and during the intro. It’s great, and reminds me a lot of Indiana Jones. However in the actual game there is no music. You aren’t even able to listen to your iPod music while playing the game.

One huge problem with the game is the view. According to the game description Rocky can see for miles and miles. For you, you can only see about 8 feet in front of you. Your zoomed in too far to see what is coming in front of you so you have to play through the level 3 or 4 times to memorize the track so you know what’s coming. Even when you know what’s coming (like a snake bone thing bobbing up and down) you can’t see if its down or up so you don’t know if it’s safe to proceed. This game needs a wider viewing angle to be playable.

The controls don’t feel right either. To move Rocky you tilt the phone left or right. The problem is that is hard to stop or slow down in time to miss obstacle. This may not be a problem if the view wasn’t so close, but as it is you can’t react soon enough to stop in time to avoid baddies. This means it’s impossible to play through the levels first time through after a certain stage. You just have to play the same level over and over again until you memorize the track and get lucky enough to pass.

It’s also worth mentioning in this version (1.0) you cant just put your iPhone in sleep when you need to pause. The game will keep going in sleep mode. You will have to pause the game before putting your device in sleep mode.

Presentation & Graphics

The Graphics are good, very polished and colorful. It does stand out among other platform games.

Sound

What sound is there is good. I love the intro music but was disappointed that there was no in-game sound. A tip for developers out there: if your not going to provide in-game sound, let me use the music from my iPod.

Gameplay

I was hoping for a Sonic style, fast paced game. Instead I was fighting to keep from going too quickly, or jumping in the wrong places to keep from utter destruction.

Gamelife

This game gets frustrating fast. If your above 8, I can’t imagine playing this for more than 30 minutes.

Game Rating
2-stars
Rocky Artue is a good concept, but the game falls short. The developer needs to make some major changes to how the view works in order to make this game salvageable. Until that happens, I would save your $2.99 for something else.

Questions to the developer: Why doesn’t Rocky just fly through the level instead of using some stupid mine cart? When you fall off shouldn’t you be able to just fly back on?

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here

2 Comments on "Rocky Artue Review"

iPGN-Nige on Thu, 12th Feb 2009 11:05 am

Damn, I had high hopes for this game

Nacho on Thu, 12th Feb 2009 2:26 pm

me too!!!

Rocky Artue Review

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