Battle Rockets (PS Vita)
There exists a fun little concept where artists take the designs of various video game consoles and turn them into human characters called Console-tans. Using cues from the system’s appearance or public perception, these character designs can have a lot of personality and feature fun shout-outs to their associated hardware when done well. Due to their close ties to copyrighted game systems though, the idea of ever seeing them in a game seemed impossible, but due to the unfortunate impending closure of the Vita’s PlayStation Network store, I was able to discover a little game called Battle Rockets. Managing to sidestep the rights issues by never directly acknowledging which consoles the characters are inspired by, Battle Rockets primarily includes girls based on the 8th and 9th generation consoles for its roster, this small game pitting them against each other in little shoot ’em up fights.
Before you can get into the action though, you’ll need to navigate Battles Rockets’s somewhat strange menu system. Rather than simply selecting the modes or options you desire, each menu relies instead on rotating the right control stick around to move through the options. The main menus are a bit easier to handle because the limited choices mean you can rather easily point your control stick in the proper direction to select things, but the challenge select screen and character select both are incredibly dependent on you pointing that control stick in the exact spot to select the intended result. Rather than a simple menu you can scroll through, you need to pull the stick around the outside, and for the character select there are more than eight options so it’s not just the expected four directions and their diagonals. It can be finicky to pick the options at all, but if you release the stick before selecting your choice, its design naturally causes a return to center and can change your selection unintentionally. These little menu woes definitely aren’t so serious they damage the game, but it can make retrying a challenge after failure a bit more difficult for no good reason.
Turning our attention back to the Console-tans, at its most basic Battle Rockets is about two characters floating around a flat battlefield firing energy bullets at each other until one is out of health. The character sprites are small to make dodging a bit easier, but the bullets can be fired rapidly and in wide spreads to make avoiding them possible but not incredibly easy. Your own shots can cancel out incoming bullets but disappear when they make contact with them as well, so approaching the opponent can involve defensive or offensive shooting which different characters have different advantages in. All characters have four shot types, three of which are identical across the roster. You can fire one large shot as rapidly as you can tap the button for slow but powerful bullets, you can hold another button down for one long and decently strong line of bullets, and to up your chances of making contact with a moving target you can fire eight streams in different directions from your body that are weak but much harder to dodge.
The final shot type varies based on who you pick, so someone like the sporty 3D-glasses wearing woman based on the 3DS will fire a small stream of shots from her large stylus while the girl based on the Xbox Series X has a hat shaped like the rather large rectangular console that she uses to fire big globs out of its vent-like top. Some of these are more like novelties than valid tactics, the Wii U woman having this unusual quirk where she can lay down rings of bullets that expand outward extremely slowly in a way that almost makes them like mines if they weren’t so easy to avoid. However, the cycloptic representation of the Xbox One has four diagonal bullet streams to represent an X that do more damage than the regular multi-angle option so some girls still have a chance of working their attacks into play well. Their designs are unfortunately incredibly simplified for this art style so some characters like the guy based on Mac computers or the girl based on the Intellivision Amico are rather hard to connect to their inspirations, but these rough yet simplistic designs can be somewhat charming when they strike silly poses or feature strange facial expressions. The win screen in multiplayer at least shows a detailed image of the Console-tan that is rather well drawn and can help you better determine which system the character is representing.
Most of these character differences are most important in the multiplayer modes, two players actually able to play Battles Rockets at once by each holding a different end of the Vita. Since only control sticks and a set of four buttons are needed and the orientation of the screen isn’t too important to effective movement, this works surprisingly well, although the multiplayer modes aren’t always up to snuff. Duel Shock, the main combat mode, runs into the issue of the character life bars simply being far too large. Even if you keep landing bullets it depletes at a surprisingly slow rate, so these battles can drag since there simply isn’t anything to spice up the battle. Short Fuse flips this concept to make it incredibly quick though, both characters dying the moment they touch an enemy bullet. Dodging and defending are more important than ever here and things can be a little tense despite the short innings because of the raised stakes. After five rounds the player with the most wins in Short Fuse is the victor, but it can sometimes be over too quickly for its own good since there are no options to expand this better fighting style.
Cash Grab probably finds the best middle ground though, this mode not about killing the other Console-tan but instead focusing on bags of money that fly onto the field and burst into coins when shot. Both players try to grab as much coins as they can, but their bullets will knock coins loose from the other player as well, the need to collect cash and hold onto it letting offensive and defensive play both find their footing. A time limit keeps it from dragging on for too long, so while Cash Grab can still be a bit basic, it might have the best way to play multiplayer Battle Rockets. There are Remix modes for each of the multiplayer options though, although I can’t actually determine the impact of it on Cash Grab or Short Fuse. Instead, Remix mode makes Duel Shock even worse as a maze of light barriers flickers rapidly in a way that makes it practically impossible to navigate, let alone fire at your enemy. The small character sprites are surprisingly far too big for this maze’s tight quarters and are briefly stunned when they touch the changing walls so you don’t even get a chance to navigate it, so perhaps having imperceptible Remix changes like the other modes would have been preferable to this design decision.
The multiplayer is unfortunately not very exciting on the whole, but the eight single player challenges may actually be the area where Battle Rockets finds the most success. Each of these challenges features some unique win condition rather than just beating the other Console-tan in a fight, and many of them contain little references to the real world game systems like the Wii U struggling to earn more cash than the vastly more successful Nintendo Switch. While they vary drastically in quality and concept, the variety at least lets it pursue unique ideas for play. Square Root is perhaps the best idea, the hoodie-wearing shut-in that is the PlayStation Vita girl needing to avoid the Mac man’s special bullet power of being able to draw lines behind him as he moves. If the Vita girl makes any contact with a bullet in this challenge she will instantly die, so the player needs to dodge well and at the same time fire back, the power dichotomy making this a difficult but surprisingly thrilling challenge. Unfortunately our next best one is not quite as exciting, that being the challenge where you need to cancel out a certain amount of enemy bullets in a time limit, but that decent idea has some fine company like a battle where you can only use your big shots to fight or one where you need to have both you and your opponent reach near death without accidentally going over. Perhaps unsurprisingly the two maze focused challenges aren’t good at all, Cross Play far too easy since the maze is stationary and you only need to get two Console-tans to the center without much punishment for touching the walls, and Hand Holding’s premise of needing to beat the dumb yet sultry PlayStation 4 lady to the goal is too easy since she just bumbles around brainlessly while you can easily make your way there unopposed. The two coin collection challenges are simply too easy in single player though as one is a solo affair and the other the AI isn’t smart enough to put up a good fight, but there is a Super Challenges mode where some of these challenges change in quality.
Square Root is still the standout in Super Challenges as now the Mac Console-tan moves in a much more dangerous manner, and the shorter time limit in the bullet canceling game actually requires you to figure out the best tactic for doing so quickly. The Cross Play maze requires a careful hand to avoid touching the sides, but funnily enough Hand Holding is made extremely hard as PS4 now guns for the goal and you can only get to it first with perfect movement, something the stunning maze walls and sensitive control sticks makes very difficult. It is more manageable than All in One, the solo coin game now not even really sending out enough coins to beat it within the time limit. The others are mostly about the same just with more damaging shots or aggressive opponents, but the small batch of decent challenges at least means there is some enjoyment to be found in single player even if most of them are either far too easy or outright poorly conceived.
THE VERDICT: The simple energy bullet duels of Battle Rockets are far too rudimentary to hold a player’s attention for long, but the small explorations of how to alter the rules of these confrontations do mean it’s not always dull or dragged out. A few of the single player challenges feature some entertaining win conditions, and a multiplayer coin battle has the opportunity to make the most of the rather limited battle system. Unfortunately, the few minutes of fun extracted don’t have the longevity or substance to balance out the challenges that are too easy or hard for the wrong reasons, and couple it with a general roughness even in the game’s menu system, and Battle Rockets isn’t a very inviting experience. While the characters based on video game systems do lead to some cute design choices, they too are mostly squandered because there’s very little room for the game to even do anything with them.
And so, I give Battle Rockets for PlayStation Vita…
A BAD rating. Perhaps it was for the best some of the single player challenges are so easy they’re over too quickly, because it at least means the Battle Rockets experience isn’t one that bogs you down often. The few interesting challenge designs mean that the mode can entertain a little, but the frustrations of the super variants of the mazes are just one sign of something that is hard for the wrong reasons. Playing a remixed Duel Shock battle is practically impossible as well, so the game has some rather glaring problems at its lowest points. The game isn’t too big and you can often push through the worst parts eventually or just ignore the mode that is coming up short, but the rest of the game just can’t bring enough to the table to make up for those flawed ideas. Seeing the Console-tans with their character specific attacks and challenges based around their game system counterparts is something that goes by too quickly to really leave an impression as well, and it mostly feels like Battle Rockets is lacking a strong hook to keep you coming back to it. The best modes are so simple they wear thin or are only meant to be completed once, but they do at least mean the Battle Rockets is uneven rather than just a collection of game types that are too bland or poorly built to bother with.
The version of Battle Rockets I played is actually it’s 2.0 rerelease, but I also had the 1.0 release on hand and was able to see that some major usability improvements were made. The menu, despite still being strange to navigate, was improved, more characters were added, and extras like the Super Challenges were thrown in. It does almost feel like Battle Rockets was sort of beta testing itself despite being a full release, but that willingness to adjust kept this title from being even worse. Battle Rockets definitely needs more meat on its bones to be an exciting game you’ll return to for multiplayer sessions, and even just packing it with more clever challenges could do a lot to start skewing things towards a more enjoyable experience. This may not have been the kind of game I’d expect the Console-tans to appear in, but at least their small influence on its design ended up leading to some of the better aspects of this unfortunately weak shoot ’em up.