Jett Rocket (Wii)
Whenever the topic of good WiiWare exclusives comes up, you can usually expect people to bring up games from Konami’s ReBirth series or the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles games, but every now and then, an unusual choice crops up in the longer recommendation lists by the name of Jett Rocket. At first glance, Jett Rocket doesn’t seem like much. Its name seems like it’s trying too hard to be cool and the graphics aren’t very impressive, but Jett Rocket manages to stand out by being perhaps the only collect-a-thon platformer on the service. The genre choice alone makes it more interesting than many of the titles put out by smaller studios, but simply being different does not a good game make.
Shin’en’s little platformer begins with Jett Rocket overlooking the planet from his technological sky platform. The unassuming little planetary inspector is immediately interrupted by the Power Plant Posse who nick three important technological doodads and distribute them to their three generals stationed around the globe to aid them in polluting the world. Jett sets off to reclaim the doodads so he can open the way to fighting the PPP’s head honcho, but if you think he’d be rocketing off with his jet pack to do it, you’re in for a bit of a disappointment. Despite being the feature the game has based its name around, the jet pack is a very limited device that has mostly minor contributions to the platforming. When the jet pack is called for, it’s for hovering over small gaps or getting a slight height boost after a jump that could have just been replaced with a double jump and nothing would have been lost. The jet pack is further limited by its gluttonous consumption of fuel, Jett entering each level with no fuel to even use it and the pads that do provide him with juice give only enough for a small bit of hovering. It can be used to course correct a bad jump, but even that feels a bit of a waste due to how limited your fuel reserves turn out to be.
Just because the game fails to embrace its advertised mechanic doesn’t mean it fails as a whole. Jett Rocket is a rather relaxed 3D platformer, each area you enter having a very simple goal and a pretty clear forward progression from start to end. It’s less Super Mario 64 and more Super Mario Galaxy, although comparing it to either of those is comparing copper to gold. Levels do have very simple goals that almost all boil down to reaching the exit, but the game will put in a few barriers every now and then like having to activate a few switches first or collecting a few items to unlock the way onward so it’s not just a straight path.
Jett Rocket’s skills, even including the jet pack, are pretty limited. He’s got a dash attack and aerial slam that are used for flipping switches and beating baddies, but besides that the only things he can really do are interact with special environmental gimmicks. Jett will be asked to toss bombs and turn cranks in the course of his short adventure through tropical, snowy, and swampy levels, with time-sensitive challenges, precise platforming, and boss battles lightly peppered throughout. Things never get too difficult, but that seems to be the design angle rather than the game failing to put up a fight. It’s possible you will die or miss jumps, so it does at least have some threat of failure despite how relaxed the whole experience feels. Very rarely the game throws in a complete shift in controls through things like the surfboard level and the parachute drops, but they are so straightforward and underutilized that they stand out as odd for not really ever advancing into more challenging designs. You never even get on the surfboard again after the one level about it, the game only introducing a brief snowboard segment with similar controls as only a small part of a longer snow level. Most things work as well as they should at least, even the brief dalliances with different controls, but the camera is a bit of an untamed beast, sometimes swinging into walls or refusing to turn in areas where it shouldn’t really be locked.
You might be wondering by now where the collect-a-thon element comes into the picture. While in a stage, you’ll see many small blue solar cells spinning in the air waiting for you to come grab them, levels usually having 70-100 based on their structure. Initially, these might seem like optional pick-ups, the equivalent of coins in Mario, but really they’re more like the music notes in Banjo-Kazooie except even more strict on how many you need to progress. To get to the other worlds and the final fight, Jett must collect enough solar cells in the levels to open up the teleporters, and it seems like the game wants you to get well over half in most every level to beat it. Collecting a lot of solar cells isn’t too difficult, but going for as many as you can get gives the levels an extra layer of complexity that helps make up for some of their straightforward design choices and your basic platforming toolkit. The only real issues I have with their presence are that some levels will block off segments as you progress, making it impossible for you to go back and search for solar cells if you realize you’ve missed some. Since the level tracks how many you acquired total rather than which individual ones you’ve grabbed and will reset that total on every replay or death, that can lead to a return visit to a level if you wish to collect them all. There is thankfully some leeway that you only have to do pretty well at collecting solar cells to see the ending, and there’s no real special reward for grabbing them all, so it doesn’t annoy too much in the end.
Jett Rocket’s last trick in the bag to make it’s simple levels more appealing is the achievements built into the game. Jett Rocket has a few easy challenges to ease you in, but the game tests your skills with a few achievements that require unique approaches. Beating levels without killing any enemies, without collecting a single solar cell, or trying to do it in only half a minute asks the player to find where they could even complete a challenge like that and then making them consider how to overcome areas designed against that particular grain. These are totally optional, but it can lead to you doing something a little extra besides just trying to complete a level and it can make a potential return to a level to up your solar cell count a bit more interesting. It only adds longevity for real completion nuts though, but it was a nice touch in a game that could have used a quite a bit more content.
THE VERDICT: Looks can be deceiving, but sometimes, they only slightly obscure the truth. Jett Rocket is neither one of WiiWare’s greats nor is it among some of its bottom of the barrel garbage, but it is at least something with a bit of fun to it. Levels have pretty basic designs but they are easy fun with a bit to do in them, and even though the game doesn’t push the boundaries of what a platformer could be, it doesn’t really do anything that jeopardizes the experience either.
And so, I give Jett Rocket for the Wii…
An OKAY rating. Jett Rocket is a bit like collect-a-thon snack food. It’s sort of empty and doesn’t really fill you up, but it’s a nice little romp that ticks enough of the genre boxes that it needs to. It is fairly easy without feeling completely neutered for the sake of appealing to children, although I certainly would point a child at a few other action platformers before this one. Jett Rocket should have embraced its jet pack more fully or put out some more trying challenges, or really just done a bit more to make it have an interesting identity. Jett Rocket himself is kind of cute in a dorky sort of way, but the levels and enemies are all generic and exist mostly to fulfill a role needed by the stage design, the game’s character gallery even padding its ranks with the likes of moving platforms to try and make it look more robust. The achievements are nifty and the basic game structure is sound, but everything is being done in half-measures, leaving you with only a tasting menu of something that could have been better if everything was given a bit more attention and the game spent a bit more time with each part.
A highlight of WiiWare? I don’t think so, but it’s certainly not among its dregs. Jett Rocket is an inoffensive game that can scratch a few itches, but it doesn’t really stand out either. Were it not for the standards set by its contemporaries it would have fallen to the wayside completely, but it lucked out with mostly subpar competition and the innate desire for players to try and find hidden gems. It’s no diamond in the rough though, it’s more like a somewhat shiny rock. It keeps the player pleased for a while and then they’ll move on to something better, but Jett Rocket is at least a pleasant and painless platformer overall.