Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (Square Enix, 2006) is a pretty odd concept for a game. Let's take a minor, generic villain from our premiere RPG franchise and make it the main character in an action RPG / tank battle game.
Gameplay
It's an action RPG / tank battle game. That's pretty self explanatory, right? Okay. Maybe not.
Essentially, the game has two parts. In one, you run around as a slime (in my case, a slime named Blain), trying to free your fellow slimes who have been captured by evil platypuses. (Duh.) This part of the game is mediocre. Combat is generally slow and annoying as you end up picking up people your trying to beat up and have to drop them so you can hit them again. There's a little puzzle solving, some of which is engaging, but most of which feels like padding for a zelda veteran like myself. The real point of this part of the game is the addictive aspect of collecting everything you see and shipping it back to town on carts for use as ammo, crew, and crafting materials (for better ammo) for the more engaging part of the game, tank battles.
These aren't strategically detached, hexy, turn based affairs. Oh no. These are frantic, no holds barred, super tank versus super tank slug fests. Your tank has multiple ammo chutes, each randomly delivering ammo you have to scoop up and hurl into two main cannons, one that shoots straight across, and another that shoots in a high arc. So while you're scrambling around on the lower screen, trying to grab a load of ammo and not run over your own tank crew who are also grabbing ammo, you're also watching the top screen, seeing what enemy ammo is incoming to see whether the kinds of ammo you're picking up would be best used to block or clear a path for better ammo or actually do some damage. Oh yeah, and enemies have infiltrated your tank and are trying to kill you and wreck up your ammo chutes. GO! GO! GO!
As daunting as this may sound, I think I lost one tank battle over the course of the entire game, so as long as you're collecting stuff and saving all the slimes in the on foot sections you should always have enough decent quality ammo to cause lots of trouble. And experimenting with strategies, crew members, and ammo loadouts was rewarding, as well. Although, the farming requirements to gather the ammo for some strategies made them prohibitively expensive, timewise. I would have enjoyed a tank test mode that let me experiment with whatever ammo types I had unlocked thus far against the enemies I had already beaten.
Theatrics
Rocket Slime is short on story. The characters in it are, at best, there for a laugh. It's lighthearted and endearing. To get an idea of how goofy the game gets, one of the enemy mechs you fight is a tree themed behemoth called Chrono Twigger (after Squares' classic SNES game Chrono Trigger) with the subtitle "Its bark is worse than its bite". Ouch. Also, almost every category in the credits has been renamed something to do with slimes. My favorite credit? Asquishtant Progoocer. :D
Aesthetics
I like simple, cartoony, SNES era graphics, and that's what Rocket Slime delivers. The music is decent, if a bit repetitive.
Final Score
4 of 5
I almost feel guilty for liking a cute little collectathon so much. But I do. And the next time I'm burned out on whatever big budget action game I'm playing, I'll be right back in there, finishing the tank arena challenges, being congratulated by the slimes I saved, picking up those last few crafting recipes I missed, recruiting the last few monsters I don't have to my tank crew, and farming mats to try new ammo loadouts.
No comments:
Post a Comment