Rocket Arena Review: Exploding With Personality

Exceptionally polished, easily digestible, and backed by a tremendous amount of support, Rocket Arena has the potential to live a long life.

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Rocket Arena is 3v3 hero shooter and the debut title from Final Strike Games. Rocket Arena occupies a pretty crowded space in the gaming market, and yet, it’s exactly the kind of game I’m always hoping to see more of. Exceptionally polished, easily digestible, and backed by a tremendous amount of post-launch support, Rocket Arena has the potential to live a long life and the ambition to grow into something quite remarkable.

I Refuse To Say “Having A Blast”

The elevator pitch for Rocket Arena is something like “Super Smash Brothers meet Overwatch.” Rather than health bars, players have a blast meter that builds when they take hits. The higher the blast meter, the further they fly when getting hit by rockets. There are five separate game modes with different team objectives in each one, but essentially, the goal is to knock opponents out of the arena Smash Bros style.

Each of the 10 characters has a completely different type of rocket. Some are large and slow-moving, others are small and rapid-fire. Some rockets have arcing trajectories while others are more like sniper rifles. It’s pretty impressive how many different types of rockets the developers have been able to come up with. Whatsmore, each character has a pair of support abilities that activate on cool-down. There’s a unique playstyle for each competitor in Rocket Arena and I had a lot of fun experimenting with each one to find out which character’s click with me. Movement speed, weight, recovery, jump, damage, and other hidden stats are all individually tuned for each character. No two competitors play even remotely the same, which is a level of unexpected complexity and variety that extends throughout the entire game.

Absolutely Stuffed With Content

At launch, Rocket Arena features four competitive game modes and one PvE game mode called Rocketbot Attack, 10 characters, and 10 maps. The game modes include Knockout (team deathmatch), MegaRocket (King of the Hill), Rocketball ( Single CTF), and Treasure Hunt (Halo Oddball). All of the game modes can be played on any of the maps so there’s a ton of variety in the standard playlist.

As you play and level up each character individually, you’ll unlock tons of cosmetics for each. These range from high-quality skins to the colorful trails that come off of enemies when you hit them with a knock-out Megablast to the symbols, patterns, and color schemes for your totem (Rocket Arena’s take on sprays). There’s a wonderful amount of customization and pursuable cosmetics in the game that are all rewarded purely by playing the game.

There is also an artifact system that I hesitate to speak too specifically about because I’m still fairly confused about how it works. Artifacts are equipment that provide passive bonuses for your characters. They unlock with each level up, account-wide, and can be equipped to individual competitors or to everyone. They’re broken up into three categories, named Social Artifact 1, 2, and 3, though there isn’t anything thematically similar in the categories. They seemed to be grouped in a way that the developers have determined is the most balanced, but because they appear to be in random categories, it can be very difficult to keep track of the artifacts you have or strategize a complimentary build.

The artifact’s level up individually by having them equipped, I believe, and their power increases with each level. Most artifacts are fairly self-explanatory, such as “dodge distance increased” and “deal 8% more damage while on the ground,” but there are a few that use terms that the game doesn’t teach you, and there’s really nowhere to learn it.

In theory, the artifact system adds an additional layer of strategy and customization that improves progression and increases complexity, but the system as it is now feels a bit underdeveloped. All of the artifacts are unlocked in Ranked Mode, so it will be interesting to see what kind of meta develops, but my sense is that things like movement speed, air control, and damage are just too powerful and don’t leave room for other types of builds.

Getting The Support It Needs

I think what excites me the most about Rocket Arena is the long term support and frequent content updates the developers have planned for the game. The game has an incredibly strong foundation, but it’s going to need constant iteration and evolution to keeps players engaged long term. Final Strike Games is the type of studio that values feedback and transparency with its players and seems to really understand what it takes to build a community and maintain a player base.

Content will be coming to Rocket Arena a lot more frequently than most games in this genre. Each season will bring a battle pass to grind as well as new characters, maps, and limited-time game modes. Before the end of this year, we’ll see the first three seasons of Rocket Arena bring a ton of new content and special events to the game.

I have really high hopes for this game if it is able to find an audience. There are plenty of examples of hero shooters dying on the vine, and though Rocket Arena is quite a bit different from games like Battleborn, Lawbreakers, and Paragon, it’s similar enough to recent 3v3 games like Ninja Theory’s Bleeding Edge and Ubisoft’s upcoming Roller Champions that it does risk getting lost in the shuffle. Rocket Arena is a lot more than it may seem on the surface. As a 3v3 connoisseur (i.e. someone with only 2 friends) Rocket Arena is the one I’ll be sticking with.

Rocket Arena is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. A PC review copy of Rocket Arena was provided to TheGamer for this review.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/rocket-arena-review/