12 Games of Christmas: Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin (Wii U)

It seems at some point penguins managed to work their way into Christmas iconography despite having no true connection to the holiday. It’s possible the cuteness and popularity of these flightless birds meant people had no problem with tying them to winter time celebrations simply because you often find penguins in snowy climates, but however they managed to find themselves sharing Christmas tree branches and fireplace mantles with decorations of Santa and snowmen, they are now at least a small part of the seasonal decor. Because of this, having a penguin as a main character of a Christmas game isn’t too farfetched, although it does seem like Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin is sorely lacking when it comes to the rockets it title promises.

Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin is an incredibly simple Wii U title. After being launched onto the screen, presumably by unseen rocket propulsion since it would otherwise feature no representation of the Rocket part of the game’s name besides it potentially being the penguin’s first name, your goal is to keep the penguin from touching the snow-covered ground for as long as possible. Beginning with a significant boost of speed, you must use the Wii U’s touch screen to draw lines the penguin can slide on, their shape and position important in helping it either maintain or build up more momentum so play can continue. While the game displays on both the TV and Wii U GamePad, the action is entirely dependent on the touch screen, and since the view is identical on both screens, this review will use screenshots only from one screen. Playing on the Wii U GamePad isn’t too difficult, the line drawing pretty much going as smoothly as you could hope, although this means if you draw a shaky line the controller will pick up on it and make the line the penguin slides on a bumpy ride likely to make it lose speed or straight up come to a halt.

The lines the player draws in Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin pull from a fuel meter viewable at the top of the screen, the bar decreasing with every piece of line drawn, longer or more frequent lines draining it faster as one might expect. If you run out of fuel entirely, you’ll lose the ability to draw more lines, meaning the penguin will soon be doomed to hit the dirt. Refilling fuel requires guiding the penguin to grab presents floating around the air space of what looks like a calm Christmas night, but there are floating monsters who will drain the fuel instead if you accidentally cause the penguin to pass through them. These monsters aren’t really fearsome by any means, mostly just floating balls of fluff, floating jellyfish creatures, or what looks like a screaming piece of hard candy, but they are large and fairly easy to hit, their size meaning that if four were lined up in a column you’d have no way to avoid them. Thankfully the monsters usually have some deliberate space left between them to squeeze through and won’t reduce your speed if hit, but the monsters and presents are meant to make this more than a mindless distance challenge, the need to draw lines that maintain or increase the bird’s sliding speed conflicting with the need to guide it carefully around the air making for a play style that could be simple fun if it wasn’t so flawed.

While the placement of presents and monsters is somewhat randomized, they don’t seem to be fit for a play session of any considerable length. Even careful management of line usage might not get you too far, the need to maintain speed making it easy to bypass a fuel refill or worse, pass right into an enemy. The camera tries to give you time to see what’s coming by keeping the penguin far to the left, but if an enemy appears in your trajectory, arresting your momentum harshly might be the only good way to dodge them, and if you do take the hit, it’s hard to recover back to a decent amount of fuel after. The penguin has its own problems though when it comes to physics. It is rigidly locked into its tobogganing pose and has an odd weight to it, making its reactions to lines that aren’t perfectly formed somewhat strange. It’s almost better thought of as a toy block sliding across the lines, because if the length of its body has parts on slightly different elevations, it will react like a completely solid object instead of smoothly slipping onto the surface. This can make the rising and falling ramps a bit finicky since if they aren’t a perfectly drawn curve the penguin can bump around and potentially upend itself, the penguin’s adventure essentially over if he ends up on his back even if you can technically keep it going a tiny bit longer.

The quirks in the physics and randomized layouts could be stomached if the game wasn’t so empty in general. While good play can lead to you achieving a decent distance, the sustainability of a play session is low due to the fuel meter’s quick expendability and the placement of objects both helpful and harmful being unreliable. Shooting for a high score feels luck based even before you factor in the almost too accurate line drawing, but if you tire of the regular play, your options for other activities are pretty low. There is a hard mode that strains the poorly balanced ratio between fuel meter expenditure and refill pick-ups even further, but even if you play things slowly and carefully to survive with less risky and frequent lines, it only makes an already too plain game even duller as managing high speeds is the closest you’ll get to any sort of thrill from Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin. There is a two player mode on offer, the penguin donning a colored helmet to show which player is meant to be using the GamePad at the time, and the goal is to outlast each other, whoever makes it farther before touching the ground being that round’s winner. This is essentially just a menu option for something you can do naturally in the main mode, but at least the competitive angle makes for more achievable goals to beat than a high score that will mostly likely be achieved during a long dull round of play.

To the game’s credit at least, the music is actually quite energetic and sets the Christmas tone well. The menu music is a soft tune with sleigh bells that is broken by the explosive, instrument-filled version of Deck the Halls that backs the gameplay whenever you press go. The Game Over music goes in rather loudly with its bells, and considering the Deck the Halls music is already fairly loud that’s saying something. The Deck the Halls mix used has enough variation applied to it that it doesn’t grow as old as one might suspect. It helps that innings are short, and while that’s a flaw gameplaywise, it means this version of the Christmas tune doesn’t really have the time to reach the end of its well composed variations. Visually things are much more plain though, the cartoon images bright and bold but the background always the same tree-covered nighttime hills and the foreground populating with Christmas imagery like Rudolph, a North Pole sign, and snowmen, although they are randomly placed so you might have an inexplicable lineup of multiple red-nosed reindeer. These aesthetic elements could have supported a replayable high score challenge well enough even if the monsters floating about have absolutely no clear tie to Christmas, but the gameplay is just too touchy and bland to be buoyed by some decent execution on its visual and audio elements.

THE VERDICT: Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin’s simplicity is its downfall. The lines you need to draw to keep the penguin moving are accurate to a fault, making it easy to lose speed to slight imperfections in your drawing, but even if you were able to keep the penguin moving a while, it almost immediately reveals itself to be a boring and shallow task that the randomized enemies and fuel refills don’t work all that well with. The elaborate version of Deck the Halls backing up the action ends up being the best part of the game and it unfortunately gets interrupted by how easy it is to fail when trying to play in an interesting way or is undermined by the dull but effective gameplay methods that help you claim high scores in a game sorely lacking in content diversity.

And so, I give Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin for Wii U…

A TERRIBLE rating. When I have to cite a single musical track that isn’t even original as the best part of a title, you can tell it doesn’t have much of anything good going on in it. Like other casual games you might play a round or two and not see its flaws immediately, and if you put it down after scraping the surface, you might not see how bereft of content it truly is. The game hardly has the amount of variation to make two rounds feel different or interesting even if you switch to Hard Mode between them, but when you factor in the sensitivity of the line drawing with a rock solid penguin, you’ve got a game that prevents exhilarating speed with its obstacle and refill placement while making the slow and steady approach effective, bland, and eventually prone to its own death to a small bump in your line or placements for objects where you can’t build up the speed needed to properly factor them in. Multiplayer at least puts in the slightly interesting goal of beating another human being at this somewhat janky launcher game, but going for a high score just means longer immersion in a very shallow content pool whose variability only harms the experience.

Developer Petite Games quite appropriately creates many small titles like this for the Wii U eShop that are lacking in overall content but hope to scrape by on what they intend to be simple yet solid basic designs. Christmas Adventure of Rocket Penguin however misses that mark, leaving it a game that mostly just hopes to get sales by associating itself with a holiday and only costing 2 bucks to buy. Price doesn’t change the inherent quality of a game though, especially in a world where digital sales discount mammoth titles of exceptional quality down to five dollars at times, but even ignoring its context in gaming as a whole, this doesn’t provide anything particularly good to justify its purchase. The penguin element is minimal, the gameplay concept has been done better and with more content in other titles like Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, and despite having a rocking cover of Deck the Halls, Christmas music is so often redone that you can no doubt find even that in a better form somewhere besides this threadbare Wii U title.