Another game from the creators of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, a great and addictive game, owned by many, many Xbox 360 owners. The expectations for Boom Boom Rocket are high, but can it possibly be as good as Geometry Wars? Boom Boom Rocket gives us a nice firework show where timing is everything and your feeling for rhythm is put to the test.

Boom Boom Rocket is a rhythm based music game where you have to press the correct color button, A, B, Y or X on you controller based on the colors of the firework icons and on the rhythm of the music. You can set the icons to show arrows, letters of just plain colors. Like most rhythm based games, there’s a line where the icon passes when you have to hit the correct button. When done correctly the firework explodes and is sure to give you a nice show on your television. In single player there is the Standard Game mode and the Endurance Game mode. In Standard Game mode you play a song for a single lap and in Endurance Game mode the songs loop while the beats per minute increase. Then there is the Practice Game mode and the Freestyle mode. In Practice Game mode you can play the game without dying and without getting a score. You might think this is pointless, but in fact it isn’t: the game can be pretty tough on Hard and if you can’t get a song on hard in Standard Mode, this mode seems perfect to enhance your skills. Pressing LB plays the song in slow-motion so you can practice to get past the busy parts easily. Freestyle mode does seem a bit pointless, but that’s also because it’s supposed to be fun for kids. There’s no line or score whatsoever. There’s no need in pressing on the rhythm of the music, not even pressing the correct color, but then again, they made this mode for kids. If you just want to sit back and enjoy a Boom Boom Rocket firework show, then the last Game Mode is suited for you. You just pick out a song of your own and the firework show starts.

Awesome!

The game is, like Geometry Wars, very much score based, which makes it very addictive if you want to beat your friends. There are leaderboards on Xbox Live, separate for every song and difficulty. After you complete a song you get a ranking and see stats like your hit percent and accuracy. You can also view these in the leaderboards to compare the stats with your friends. The accuracy shows how accurate you time; the more accurate you let your firework explode, the more points you get for it. The difference in points is quite large, so if you don’t have any feeling for music, don’t waste your time on trying out this game. If you play the game correct you should get a 4x multiplier for your points pretty fast. If the meter is full you can run a bonus run where you can score points very fast for a short time.

The in game visual effects are nice. The exploding fireworks look awesome and the backgrounds are pretty cool. The camera flies above a city at night, with every song above a different part of it, the motion of the camera can be pretty annoying at some times because you can get disorientated very fast (especially in the multiplayer). The fireworks are very colorful and are improved by the addicting new fireworks you can unlock while playing a song on each of the 3 difficulty settings. These new firework types are special shaped explosions that you’ll see in your firework shows once you’ve unlocked them. While in a bonus run the look of the city changes completely and the firework looks ten times more spectacular.

Boom Boom Rocket only has local multiplayer…

The music in this game is one of the most important aspects. And it’s quite addictive, the tunes are catchy and you’ll know most of them since they’re all well-known or at least based on classical tunes. Sometimes the exploding of the fireworks (especially when doing a bonus run) is so loud it’s almost impossible to hear the music in the back. If you think this is annoying, you can bring down the Sound FX volume in the menu. However, when I did this the first time the complete music in the game was gone, I think this is a bug of some kind. I had to restart the complete game in order to get the background music in both the menu and while playing songs.

Unfortunately this game has no Xbox Live Multiplayer, just a lot of leaderboards. Local multiplayer however, is absolutely the best part of the game. Multiplayer features battle mode and endurance mode, with endurance mode being most fun because it gets really chaotic and you must make sure you don’t die before your friend does. There’s one obvious downside in multiplayer: it can be pretty hard to see what icons belong to you since they can go from right to left on the screen. The right player has a small advantage since his icons come from the edge of the screen. I’ve had some fun experiences and good laughing with my friends.

Looks quite spectacular doesn’t it?

Boom Boom Rocket is definitely a fun game with a good choice of songs so far. The single player is challenging while the multiplayer creates a lot fun for you and your friends. The cost of 800 Microsoft Points is a bit high. For many of you, the free demo will probably do fine. Since it’s published by EA Games we can expect more songs on the Xbox Live Marketplace which we have to buy for a price which we’ll probably all consider to be too high…

Final Score: 8 out of 10 - Good (How do we rate games?)