Review: Rocket Penguin Downhill
by Staff Writer
March 4, 2010
Overview
Rocket Downhill Penguin is a casual tilting game where you guide a penguin down the slopes as though its snowboarding on its stomach. It’s an endless game where you just avoid the trees, and collect the goodies for as long as you can. As you are going down the slope the penguin will begin to freeze, and you need to warm it up with some cocoa, with a coco meter at the bottom of the screen.
Features
The game is scored by what you collect, but distance travel doesn’t impact score at all. Coffee mugs are worth 50 points, and restore your warmth, snowman freezes you a little, but you can knock their hat off which is worth 100 points. Occasionally medals pop up that are worth 500 points, and an extra life. Finally, trees are just obstacles you need to avoid, as they decrease your warmth quickly. The game is controlled by just tilting back and forth in portrait mode. Facebook connect is used for the high score interface.
The Good
The game is so simple that anyone can handle it. There is a nice mechanic of having to maintain a warmth meter, and not just slide as long as you can. It’s different to have to collect items for score, and to keep going. The snowmen create a risk decision for you to make. Choose to run into them losing some of your warmth to get the 100 point hat, or just avoid them like the trees. Also, just hitting a snowman doesn’t guarantee a hat, as it flys up ahead, and you have to collect it.
The game is nicely designed with everything finely polished, and a practically 3D perspective to the trees, snowmen, and penguin. The trail you slide is nicely animated, and so are the animations of running into snowmen and trees. As you progress without coco the screen begins to freeze which is really well done. The included soundtrack is nice to listen to, and puts you in a wintery mood.
The Bad
The controls are jerky at best, leaving you sliding from the left edge to the right edge with no ability to maneuver precisely. On top of that, this is as basic as a game can be. In the middle of your first game you become bored of the monotony, and there’s no reason to ever open this app again.
Facebook connect is lackluster compared to OpenFeint for example, or other similar services. On top of that it doesn’t work very well, with the online scores appearing intermittently. For a high score based game with relatively no online high scores, that is a major flaw. The scoring system itself isn’t that great with your total distance not valued in your score in any way.
