Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken

"Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken" was a tag along I got in a recent Humble Bundle. It's a platformer that follows the story of Hardboiled, a chicken dude with a jetpack and a mission, to eliminate the penguin dictator Putzki and all his lackeys.

I basically started playing this game in the hopes that I would hate it, and then I could just unceremoniously remove it from my backlog and move on. Sorry, bro. I didn't dislike it enough to just quit though, so I finished it, but I still didn't necessarily like it. There were good things, there were bad things, there were...whatever things.

THE GOOD

There are animated cutscenes between levels that are pretty enjoyable. They're well done and have a pretty cool soundtrack by New World Revolution. It was kind of a jarring combo during the first cutscene, but they kind of became my favorite parts.

There was a mechanic too that I liked where you could throw mind control bugs at baddies. When they took effect, you could control the enemy as if he were your character, using him to kill enemies, unlock doors you couldn't get to, etc. It adds new puzzle possibilities, and I enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed the segments where you got to fly around outside dirigibles and shoot down enemies that were flying around, swarming you, and shooting rockets at your face. I hated these segments to start because the controls are kind of crummy, but once I got the hang of it, it was actually fun.

THE BAD

The environment is sometimes hard to navigate. The background isn't always immediately obvious as to what is climbable and what is just background. The ledges are sometimes concealed in the middle of what just looks like a floor. It was infuriating at times. There were also times you had to throw a mind control bug through a window or opening, but you couldn't tell it was an opening. It just looked like wall.

I couldn't figure out how to change weapons for the longest time either. Right after I picked up my second weapon, it flashed a symbol to notify me how to swap them out, but I had no idea what the symbol was. I think it must have been a symbol of a mouse. Symbols are supposed to alleviate confusion. That...it did not do.

In trying to figure out the controls, I made my way to the menu system, which is also a variety of terrible. There are Back buttons on the Main Menu that don't even do anything. Let's play "Find the real Back button". Dumb. Also, you couldn't change your control bindings while you were paused in-game. That menu option was just missing. You had to quit out to the Main Menu, and the Controls menu item would be available there. Whhhyyyy?!

Additionally, the sound design wasn't bad in general, but when any cardinal character spoke, it drove me insane. All dialogue is displayed as speech bubbles over a character's head, while some weird speech-like sound is played. The cardinals' in particular had a very annoying sound. I was probably more aware of it because they had the most dialogue, and that sound just seemed to loop for ages.

THE WHATEVER

Combat was fairly easy even with multiple attackers flanking you. It was all about burst firing. Shooting a baddy would throw them up in the air, keeping them from attacking you til they got up. You'd have to shoot them up in the air about three times until they died. If you had one baddy in front of you and one in back, you'd just shoot a couple rounds into one, then the other, back to the first one, and repeat until dead.

This super efficient way of dealing with enemies favored the machine gun. Later, you would get theoretically better weapons, but they would leave you open to getting shot more frequently, so I just stuck with the same weapon 95% of the time. Grenades were also pretty useless.

When you do happen to die, you'll restart at your last checkpoint with full health and ammo. This is great for progressing quickly, but it seems kind of cheating gameplay-wise. In the big wave upon wave fights, you don't need to be that good or conserve ammo, you just have to get to the next checkpoint. There were about 3 checkpoints in the middle of a multi-wave fight. Whether this is good or bad is based on what you want out of the game, I suppose. I just wanted to beat it, so I didn't care that much that it was spoon-feeding me success.


So yeah...it wasn't necessarily that fun, but it kept my interest enough to want to finish it. Quite the glowing review, I know...