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Rocket Bowl is one of the most simplistically satisfying XBLA games I’ve ever purchased. Imagine bowling on a golf course, where fairways are replaced by huge expanses of hardwood. Rolling hills, loop-de-loops, and skatepark-style half pipes help to make Rocket Bowl very challenging, without building a wall that excludes the kiddos. I put about 6 hours into the game this weekend, along with my 5-year old and my wife, and I gotta give it a thumbs up. It’s instant, sit-down-and-play fun for just about any skill level.
The overall idea is to take a game like bowling, and inject thrusters, obstacles, and terrain into the equation. Additionally, you can choose to play Rocketbowl in a non-linear manner. While you do have a specific starting place for each “frame” you can instead choose to spin around and take a sneaky shot on an upcoming hole because you have a better angle on it. You can also use this to pick up pins you might not have taken down in a previous frame.
Despite how chaotic that sounds, the game still happens in an organized manner, and the top score is still 300. While giving the player 3 throws instead of the traditional 2 is a bit of overkill on the simpler courses, you’ll be happy to have them as you progress to the more difficult levels.
Rocket Bowl uses the Torque physics engine, and while it isn’t the most graphically intricate game by a long shot, it performs very smoothly and the ball behaves much the way you might expect a bowling ball with rocket boosters to behave. The pin action when you make contact is very realistic looking.
Multiplayer in Rocket Bowl is a lot of fun, and for controller-challenged households like mine, you’ll be happy to know that local multiplayer supports pass and play with up to 4 people. There’s also a standard Xbox Live mode as well. You can customize the game in a couple of different ways to suit your taste, inlcuding letting one player bowl his three shots followed by the next, or ALTERNATING shots… kinda like golf.
Single player is basically a collection of challenges and tournaments where you earn money for more gear (bowling balls) that increase your ball’s agility or give it powerups like more rocket boosters.
The only bad thing Ihave to say about Rocket Bowl is that while I enoy the neo-50’s art design, the music is very repetitive. I killed that in short order. Otherwise you’ll have the “Rocket-Bowwwwwl” mini-jingle stuck in your head for days.
For 10 bucks (800 MS points) this is a solid game you’ll come back to again and again.
I say buy it.
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