The Rocketeer (SNES)

"WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! It's worse than the NES version! It might even be worse than Wizard of Oz! Or Hong Kong 97! This might be the WORST phff-fucking Super Nintendo game I've ever played! It just started and I can't even figure out what to do!!!"

- The Angry Video Game Nerd The Rocketeer is an action game featuring the comic strip/movie character of the same name that was released for the mh:awesomegames:Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992. It was developed by Novalogic and published by IGS games.

Why You Should Rocket Far, Far Away from It

 * 1) Wasted potential: You first start off the game with flying in a continuous circle, where it was coming from a scene in the movie that had Cliff in a plane, it feels like a direct insult to fans of the movie that were expecting to have jetpack flying, hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, and action-adventure gameplay, especially where there were scenes in the original film had the full potential for being perfectly adapted into a video game. Especially when the cover itself had the word "action-packed" in it.
 * 2) * It puts way too many gameplay styles to work as a proper video game and it doesn't know what it wants to be. This isn't a good way to experience a straightforward action/adventure game and is more of a bigger mess than you'd imagine.
 * 3) Speaking of that beginning level, it feels clumsy and awkward to control where you are going unless you look at the tiny box below the main screen, which means that you have to look at a small screen the whole time during these races. This can seriously make your eyes sore since you'd have to squint to see how small the sprites are. If you didn't know you'd have to do that, you keep bumping into the towers because of the controls. You have to complete  ten laps in the first race, and fifteen laps in the second race,  right before you reach the next level. This feels like a deliberate attempt to waste the player's time in an extremely insulting way.
 * 4) * It also adds The Rocketeer as an added sprite-swap, which is pointless, unnecessary, and feels like a joke since he controls in the same way as the planes (if having more room to control).
 * 5) * The A.I. planes are absolutely cheap, you would always have at least one chance to beat them because of how much you can easily screw up with the plane and its level design that is very awkward to navigate.
 * 6) There are no checkpoints during the levels, nor any continues.
 * 7) Poor Navigation: The controls for the plane and The Rocketeer are stiff, clunky, and awkward to use in the air races, the shooting levels, and the flying stages. Where you can adapt to it by its small screen below to help to line yourself up in the air races, it reaches Top Gun levels of frustrating gameplay, except it's less fun and less rewarding to do.
 * 8) While the music is decent, it's very uninspired.
 * 9) The sound effects either range from tolerable, to flat-out annoying, the biggest offender being the sounds of the plane you fly in the first level for example.
 * 10) The levels are incredibly tedious. They each have this same feeling of lacking any kind of fun in them, are practically an endurance test, and really have nothing to enjoy about it. The shooting levels that revolve you in a target practice room, for example, are the weakest parts of the game, where you move the cursor to shoot anything and it feels like an extremely shitty version of G.I Joe (1992) and Wild Guns.
 * 11) Speaking of which, in that same level when you move around in the shooting levels, the camera often spazzes to the left and right when you move, so much to the point that it can sometimes make you feel dizzy.
 * 12) * And being able to use your rocket in them is completely pointless since it's simply doing what you can do on foot and it always touches the ceiling when you do hover around.
 * 13) Rehashing previous levels: After you finish the second level, you are treated back to another air race ... yes, we kid you not! While you are not in the plane again and flying around as The Rocketeer and it is easier to win, it has a Superman 64 vibe of repeating the same level all over again as lazy reuses of the previous levels.
 * 14) * After you get another cutscene, you go back to the shooting level, and it's even more annoying than it already was, mainly because of the enemies firing grenades that its sprite sizes are so small and distracting, it's hard to see them coming at you. Where you are treated to a boss fight, your only form of strategy is to shoot faster than it since it is near impossible to dodge its attacks, where it may seem exciting, sadly it's still not any fun.
 * 15) After you are finally done with the previous stages, you finally get to do what you were expecting to get, flying around and shooting enemies in the sky, and it's one of the worst 2D shooters ever. These reasons include:
 * 16) * The Rocketeer is a huge target for your enemies.
 * 17) * Not being able to turn around to shoot enemies coming from behind.
 * 18) * Moving around is very slow-paced and imprecise, which makes dodging anything coming at you nearly impossible.
 * 19) * The enemies swarm from either in front of you or behind you, which causes a lot of fake difficulty.
 * 20) * It feels like you have to use 'brute force to get through anything rather than strategy.
 * 21) * You can accidentally shoot your health away while all of shooting the enemies coming at you, which makes you hope that you don't take damage.
 * 22) * It lasts for ten minutes, which feels like an eternity considering that it increases boredom from doing the same thing over and over again in an unbelievably monotonous way.
 * 23) And right after you finish it, you do the exact same thing all over again, except you're in a big, green, weirdly bloated plane that is even less fun to control than The Rocketeer.
 * 24) Right after you complete the flying stages for what it feels like over an hour, you have to partake in one of the most awkward beat-em-ups in the history of gaming and the worst stage in the game. When you thought the previous stages were difficult and hard to endure, this stage will prove you wrong.
 * 25) * Hitting and dodging are uncontrollable every time you press a button.
 * 26) * While each one isn't very hard, the real challenge is fighting while the guy from above is throwing bombs at you and can easily make massive damage if they manage to hit you, and he does this either randomly or in a sometimes, pathetically inept way no-less. So you have to pray that you'll make it through to progress onto the next part, considering that it all has to be done in a hurry.
 * 27) After sitting through a very slow in-game cutscene, you partake in another poorly done fistfight in a rather short way before thankfully ending the game.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The presentation overall looks very good for SNES. Where the sprites and backgrounds are designed very well.
 * 2) * The cutscenes look nice and they seem to decently follow the comic-book style from its comic book series.
 * 3) Reverting back to bad quality pointer 5, the music can be nice to listen to, if sounding somewhat uninspired in some areas.
 * 4) While the bare minimum this game has to offer is the side-scrolling level where you control The Rocketeer flying in the sky as expected, it is poorly executed.
 * 5) * Flying as The Rocketeer in the air races is much more natural to control than the plane.

Gameplay
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Videos
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