One evening when I was bored I found myself paging through the Xbox store looking for something cheap and not very stressful to play. I love video games and I love great video games but sometimes I just want something where I can turn off my brain and not worry about my reflexes and just zone out without concentrating too hard. Not finding anything cheap that appealed to me after a few minutes I remembered that Xbox Games With Gold had given away the 360 reboot of Rocket Knight the prior month, which is a game I had always been mildly curious about, though not enough to spend money on it. Since I already had a copy now, though, and because I knew it was a short game, I decided to check it out and see whether it deserved its bad reputation or if it was, as the kids say, a hidden gem.

It’s not a hidden gem. Rocket Knight is a fairly old video game property. It started as a Genesis game called Rocket Knight Adventures and then got two different sequels released under the same name (Sparkster) on the SNES and Genesis before fading into semi-obscurity. The first game is pretty well regarded as a B-tier but solid platformer, and the sequels are seen as not quite as good but still playable iterations on the formula. Sparkster is also the hero’s name, and he is an opossum who wears a suit of armor with a rocket pack, making him the game’s eponymous rocket knight. In the first games the opossum people were attacked by armies of various other creatures, and in this one we see Sparkster peacefully at home with his family when there’s yet another attack, this time by wolves. Sparkster dons his armor and he’s off to face the wolf threat and save the kingdom once again. It’s a very barebones plot and the game has a few silent cut scenes, but most of the storytelling is done through text descriptions on loading screens. This is not one you will be playing for its deep rich lore.

You won’t be playing it for the graphics or music either. Graphically the game looks like a high res version of a PS2 title. This is a 2010 Xbox Live Arcade and PSN release, and while it came out after the XBLA service had already evolved from simple arcade ports to a legitimate source of modern downloadable games like Shadow Complex and Monday Night Combat, it harkens back to an earlier time when XBLA games tended to be simple affairs that didn’t make full use of the hardware. It’s colorful and not really ugly per se (there are even a few levels that have some nice designs) but simple and unimpressive. There are some XBLA games that still hold up graphically due to being stylish or just very well crafted for the time (games like Deadlight, Shadow Complex, and Comic Jumper come to mind) but this isn’t one of them. Sound is similarly not a high point. The sound effects are fine, though not memorable, but the music is an issue. It’s not that it’s bad music, it’s that the loops are extremely short, even moreso than the standards in the 8 or 16 bit era. The first time you hear a loop it’s pretty good stuff but by the time you get to the end of a level it is grating and I just listened to podcasts for most of the game because the short loops started bothering me.

So how does this mediocre looking game with short music loops actually play? It’s…fine for the most part. I never played the 16 bit originals so I can’t speak to them, but for polygonal 2D platformer this game is very much straight down the middle. Sparkster can jump and slash, he can shoot a short range projectile, he can hang from rails, and the main gimmick of the game is his rocket pack. Using this he can shoot in one of five directions (left, right, up, or diagonal) holding his sword out for attack. He can also ricochet off walls if he hits them diagonally, allowing him to essentially wall jump. He can also use the pack to slow his descent and execute a spin attack that’s rarely useful. This move set is fine for what it is but the controls do feel a little loose and nothing has the range you expect. Sparkster’s rocket charge doesn’t go that far, his shot is a piddly thing that only reaches about a third of the screen, and in general he feels a bit underpowered. In addition to health meter (and the game generously gives you a lot of hits before you die) you have a fuel meter that recharges automatically and powers Sparkster’s rocket pack and shots. This mostly isn’t a big concern and can be recharged just by standing around for a bit. The game also feels a tiny bit loose, for lack of a better word, like there’s a slight delay in controls that makes precise movements difficult. None of this is game breaking and the levels are mostly simple enough that they’re not a chore to get through, but it never coheres into something where movement feels fun for its own sake. It just feels kind of adequate to the task.

And that task is not very difficult either. Levels in Rocket Knight are simple platforming affairs. You jump around from platform to platform going mostly left to right to advance, fight a few enemies, collect gems to raise your score and health to replenish the hearts you lose from damage, and occasionally face a boss. I don’t enjoy combat in this game. Enemies are either so weak as to pose no challenge, or fire huge numbers of projectiles at you that are a pain to dodge. There are some enemy types that I had trouble taking on effectively without taking damage, though you can just rocket past many of them, which may be the intended way of dealing with them. There are enough hearts and extra lives scattered around the levels that at least in normal mode the game is never frustrating, but I don’t think this is the best way of managing challenge in platformer. The platforming itself is a bit better, and also pretty easy because there are few bottomless pits. Level hazards like fire and lasers do provide a more substantial challenge, so the platforming is more engaging than in games where there are no threats at all. The game is short, clocking in at around 2 hours, and it changes things up substantially during that time. There are 3 horizontal shooter levels where Sparkster just flies with the rocket pack and shoots at his enemies with either his normal shot or a charged beam that goes across the whole screen. These are okay, though not special enough that I wish there were more of them. There’s an area where Sparkster’s rocket pack is frozen which keeps it from recharging its fuel so you have to either stand next to a fire to warm it or pick up fuel icons in the environment. This is annoying because it takes away the one thing that keeps the game from being completely generic, but at least it makes you play differently, conserving your rocket use for when you need it. There’s a puzzle platformer section where you need to hit switches to open platforms or get rid of lasers, sometimes on a timer, and this works fine but again not so well that you wish there was more of it. In general I’d say the designers do a decent job of keeping things fresh but never get to the point where the game is anything better than okay.

Boss fights are probably where the game is most challenging and interesting. Sparkster battles a few different bosses including giant robots and a rival opossum named Axel. These fights can be challenging and are the only places where I lost substantial numbers of lives. The final boss fight is especially tough and I looked up a strategy to beat him because I was running low on lives and continues and had no desire to start the game over. While the bosses are medium tough this is where the game’s controls really frustrated me. I just felt like I didn’t have enough control to avoid all the projectiles and especially to hit the fast moving enemies. Every rocket burst felt like a bit of a roll of the dice. None of it is super difficult but even though the bosses have their own stages and the game has a stage select so you can replay them I can’t imagine actually doing so. I will almost certainly delete the game soon and never download it again.

And that’s perhaps the most damning thing about Rocket Knight. It feels utterly disposable. It’s very short, has nothing to really recommend it, and while it has additional difficulties (and the hard mode has special requirements to unlock it and progress) I can’t imagine who would really want to play this multiple times. It’s not egregiously terrible but there’s nothing in particular to recommend it unless, perhaps, you’re a big fan of the property.

Rocket Knight is far from the worst game I’ve ever played. For the low low price of free with my subscription it wasn’t a bad way to spend 2 hours when I just wanted something simple and semi-generic to play. I liked parts of it, such as the later enemy designs and the puzzle platformer levels. But for $15 in 2010 there were so many better options out there, and it’s a terrible value. It’s sitting at around 70% on Metacritic and that surprised me. This game has big 6/10 energy, and honestly that’s partly inflated because it’s a well liked property. For me the short length and imprecise controls make it more of a 5/10 type experience. Climax Studios would go on to make much more interesting platformers based on popular properties when they made the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games, which I played earlier this year and kind of enjoyed. Konami would go on to make games for a few more years and then stop to focus on Pachinko and health clubs, with the occasional retro re-release or rumblings of starting back up again. At least this wasn’t yet Metal Gear Survive and Contra: Rogue Corps Konami. Rocket Knight doesn’t actively spit on the legacy of the games that came before, it just doesn’t do much to enhance it. It’s generic and mediocre but not actively insulting or bafflingly ill conceived. But I would have much rather had an emulated compilation of the three prior games in the series. At the time this was a new entry in an old series that people had fond memories of. These days it’s just the newest but still pretty old entry in a dusty old series where every prior game was better. Maybe Konami will re-release those at some point (they just re-released the GBA Castlevania games so it’s definitely possible) but even if they don’t there’s no point in playing this one unless you got it for free and are in the mood for a short time waster with maybe a hint of nostalgia baked in for fans of the series.