Rocket Knight Adventures

"Yeah it was just there to cash in on the Sonic crowd, but not bad"

1993 was the Sonic series was really starting to hit its stride and get popular with the gamer crowd. A bunch of video game companies were clearly aware of this, and a bunch of other cutesy animal run-and-jump games were released around that time. One of them was this little game called Rocket Knight Adventures.

The story is fairly familiar: there's these bad guys, see, and they captured this princess, see, and want to find this all-powerful spaceship and only one guy can stop them and save the princess.

The finer points, as usual, are what make it unique. You're Sparkster, the rocket knight, a possum with armor, a sword and a jet pack and you fight your way through the pig soldiers of the Devotindos kingdom and their variety of bizarre vehicles and boss robots.

Sparkster doesn't have Sonic's speed, but there is that jet pack. By charging it up he can fly for short distances, up tunnels, crashing through enemies, or getting some altitude to land on a ledge or platform. There's a lot of things it can do, and learning what they are and how and when to do them are the keys to winning the game.

While they couldn't quite touch Sonic, the graphics in Rocket Knight Adventures are better than other such games of the time like Buster's Treasure Hunt, Bubsy the Bobcat and High Seas Havoc. The look of each level is nicely distinct from the others, even though they can get a little repetitive in and of themselves.

The sounds, especially the music, are good, and in the case of the music often catchy. The control is nice and responsive, though the control of the jetpack takes a little getting used to.

While I'm talking about the controls, I'd like to mention what was a frustrating part of the game for me. See, in both Rocket Knight Adventures games, there are points when Sparkster hops into a giant robot and has a giant-sized fistfight against another giant robot piloted by his rival, Axle Gear. The problem was this game didn't tell you how to control it, so you had no idea what you were doing, while Axle Gear was a master. And his robot seemed faster and stronger anyways. That's just not fair, after trying so hard to get that far and then running out of lives because I had no idea how to control the thing. At least Konami was smart enough to keep it from happening twice.

Aside from that the game is interesting, especially to those who were into all the cartoon animal action games like I was. I guess not so many people were interested in it, though, because only one sequel and one SNES version were ever released. And the heyday for animal sidescrolling heroes seems to have come and gone.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/12/04