Rocketmen: Axis of Evil Demo Review - PS3

One might wonder when is there actually reason to review a demo of a game. After all, isn't the purpose of a demo that someone can try out a game before committing money to a purchase? Well there is still a minor commitment of time and hard drive space when it comes to downloading and installing a demo. In addition, it does take at least a little bit of time to play through the demo itself. So I would say that a demo review probably means either the demo is so great you have to run right out and try it now or it's so terrible that it's not even worth the time taken to download and play it. Unfortunately, in the case of Rocketmen: Axis of Evil, it's the latter.

The first thing you are taken through in the demo is creating your character. There are several attributes taken into account when making your character, however, there is nothing to inform you what those attributes actually do. Thus, you are left just blindly assigning points based off of what you think might be beneficial with no indication how it actually affects the gameplay.

The next thing you are confronted with are the cutscenes which introduce you to the story. The game aims for something like a cheesy 50's era sci-fi feel but it just comes off very poorly. The voice acting used is terrible... really terrible. I have seen YouTube videos with better voice work. The cut scenes are also presented in a pseudo-comic book sort of way with animation separated by frames. While this can be an excellent method of storytelling (see Folklore) here it is just pointless. The frames and onomatopoeia emphasized sounds are simply frivolous additions. Finally, the cel-shaded graphics used to presumably help pull off the comic presentation are poorly done as well. I have seen much better on Dreamcast Jet Grind Radio than what's presented here.

Finally we come to the actual gameplay itself. Rocketmen is at its core a top down run-n-gun shooter presented in a sightly isometric view. There are a few problems with how this is handled though. The camera is zoomed in so far and you have to get so close to the edge of the screen to get it to move that often you find yourself jumped by enemies who were hiding just offscreen. There is a decent variety of weapons presented and some hints of more good ones be found. In addition the game presents a very promising amount of character leveling and customizability. In all, though, it's really just not enough to save the overall experience. After all, who wants to try and level their character further when the gameplay and presentation stink as bad as they do.

In Summary:
+ Promising amount of character leveling and customizability
+ Interesting weaponry
- Nothing to indicate the effect of character attributes during creation
- Terrible voice acting
- Completely ineffective comic book style cutscene presentation
- Awful camera movement
- Poor cel-shaded graphics

Over all, the Rocketmen : Axis of Evil demo isn't even worth the time and hard drive space required for the download. Just skip it - you'll be happy you did.