The fun is not infinite with ∞Rocket

A project that could have been more fleshed out...

∞Rocket

∞Rocket
Available on: iOS
Release Date: July 7th, 2016
Price: Now free!
Reviewed on: iPhone 6 Plus

When I was contacted to try the game ∞Rocket by ChameleonWare on iOS, I was curious and happy to give it a try. I’ve played a lot of vertical shoot-em-ups back in the day. Galaga, Galaxian, Gradius, 1942 and Ikaruga to name a few.  I told myself that it would be a blast to go back to an old love. Unfortunately, what I had was a game that felt more like a school project and felt really shallow.

You are a rocket, located at the bottom of the screen.  It fires automatically at incoming satellites. Your goal is simple: avoid the projectiles thrown by the satellites, absorb the other ones and try to get the highest score possible.  If you get hit, you die, your score is reset, then you restart. That is the core of the game.

The mechanics themselves are very simple, I had no technical problems with the game. No gameplay bugs, crashes, etc.  You can move the rocket left and right by dragging it with your finger on the screen, or if you prefer, you can activate tilt controls, which works well and the sensitivity can be adjusted.  What is present works without any glitches.  Unfortunately, this is already where the good points end.

∞Rocket∞Rocket just looks quite bland and ordinary, like a Flash game that was developed years ago and ported directly to iOS. There is no background music and you have an inconsistent “pew-pew” sound effect when your rocket shoots, which sounds like a zapper from the 80s.

There are no explosions or effects that happen when you die. There is also only one type of obstacle to shoot – satellites. They all are alike except for a few with different colors which, shoot different colored projectiles. Even in terms of score tracking, there were no leaderboards whatsoever, which could have been an incentive to play the game repeatedly.

In my opinion, the lack of polish and features makes it looks more like an school project. With such a low level of content it’s shocking that this was not released originally as a free game. However, since I initially installed the game, the developer has stopped charging for the title.

There is a multiplayer option, but I couldn’t find any players to play the game with after a few days of trying.

In summary, I can’t honestly recommend this game to anybody. The content present is working like it should, but it is so shallow that I was never able to keep playing for more than 5 minutes at a time.  The rockets are infinite, but the fun I had was very limited.