Sure it looks basic, but I don’t think Boom Boom Rocket is trying to be something “original”. Instead it’s filling the need for an addictive casual music/rhythm game on the 360. As rockets fly against a spectacular cityscape, time their detonation to the beat of the music to unleash some awesome pyrotechnics. Featuring four game modes including two multiplayer modes, and a great soundtrack, Boom Boom Rocket is the explosive must-have game for Xbox Live Arcade.

Boom Boom Rocket (BBR) is a downloadable video game for Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade service. Boom Boom Rocket is the first rhythm game for Xbox Live Arcade and was developed by Geometry Wars creators Bizarre Creations and published by the Pogo division of Electronic Arts. The game was made backwards compatible on Xbox One on July 26, 2016.^[1]

Gameplay[edit]

The objective of Boom Boom Rocket is to trigger fireworks explosions in time with music, in a gameplay style very similar to that of Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. Each rocket is color-mapped to one of the colored buttons on the Xbox 360 controller. A life gauge, which also serves as a score multiplier meter, fills with each successful shot and drains with each missed shot, and players are graded on overall hit accuracy. If the life meter drains completely, the player fails the song and the game is over. Each song has three unlockable firework types, one for each difficulty level. If the player successfully triggers a prescribed number of fireworks a rocket with a wavy tail appears. If this special rocket is triggered, the firework is unlocked and it will randomly replace other firework types on subsequent songs. If the rocket with the wavy tail is missed, or the song is not completed, the firework type remains locked.

An update that was released in November 2007 allows the game to recognize other controllers like guitars and dance pads. When using a guitar the rockets need to be 'strummed' just as in Guitar Hero to be exploded in time.

Boom Boom Rocket includes several single-player modes and a local two-player mode. Single-player modes include the basic game, Endurance Mode (in which the song loops continuously and gradually speeds up, with the player attempting to complete as many 'laps' as possible), and Practice Mode. Additionally, the game provides a Visualizer mode, which creates a fireworks display timed to the rhythm of audio files stored on the player's console.

The game provides twelve achievements (worth 200 Gamerscore points), which focus mainly on unlocking fireworks and attaining high grade levels and hit ratios. It also supports two-player mode on the same system, but does not support online multiplayer. As with most Xbox Live Arcade games, the title includes online leaderboards.

Boom Boom Rocket features ten music tracks (fifteen with the update), with three difficulty levels per track. Each track is a classical song that has been remixed into a modern style, such as ska, funk or techno. The game's music was composed by Ian Livingstone (Batman Returns and Project Gotham Racing 2 game soundtracks). While users cannot create their own custom soundtracks or utilize music from other sources (apart from the music visualizer mode), the game does support downloadable content including new tracks composed by Chris Chudley from Audioantics. (Geometry Wars, Project Gotham Racing 3) which should have been released on November 29, 2007; but were a day late. The new songs were free for a couple weeks after release.^[2]

Track list[edit]

There are a total of ten music tracks in the game, with three difficulty levels per track. Each track is a classical song that has been remixed into one of a number of modern styles, including ska, funk and techno, and was composed by Ian Livingstone (Batman Returns and Project Gotham Racing 2 game soundtracks) and the DLC Rock Pack by Chris Chudley from Audioantics (Geometry Wars, Project Gotham Racing 3) . The songs are as follows:

• 'Smooth Operetta' (from The Flower Duet)
• 'Rave New World' (from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9)
• 'William Tell Overload' (from William Tell Overture)
• 'Hall of the Mountain Dude' (from In the Hall of the Mountain King)
• '1812 Overdrive' (from 1812 Overture)
• 'Valkyries Rising' (from Ride of the Valkyries)
• 'Tail Light Sonata' (from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata)
• 'Carmen Electric' (from Carmen)
• 'Game Over Beethoven' (from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5)
• 'Toccata and Funk' (from Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565)

DLC - Rock Pack composed by Audioantics, released November 30, 2007 is: Drawn to life wii.

• 'Sting of the Bumble Bee' (from Flight of the Bumblebee)
• 'Explode to Joy' (from Ode to Joy)
• 'Sugar High' (from Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy)
• 'Eine Kleine Rochtmusik' (from Eine kleine Nachtmusik)
• 'Cannon in D' (from Pachelbel's Canon)

References[edit]

1. ^'Two More Xbox One Backward Compatible Games Now Available'. Retrieved 2016-07-27.
2. ^'New Boom Boom Rocket DLC Available Now'. Retrieved 2016-07-28.

External links[edit]

Where next for rhythm action? We've already got guitars, drums, bongos, microphones and carpets with arrows on clogging up our front rooms. We've got on the DS. Even the PSP has. None of you bought it, but it does have one.If anyone can figure it out, surely it's Bizarre Creations, the company whose last Xbox Live Arcade game was so good and so cheap that it made all the other Xbox Live Arcade games look like overpriced derivative nonsense - including the ones that weren't overpriced derivative nonsense. Boom Boom Rocket, developed from an idea thought up at Electronic Arts, is their solution, promising to inherit the simplicity and obsession with high scores that made Geometry Wars so good.This it has done. It's so basic that you can play it with one hand.

As the camera circles around bulky skylines, fireworks with arrows on ascend toward a purple line that runs the length of the screen. When an arrow passes through the line, you press one of four corresponding buttons depending on the direction it's pointing.

High scores are borne of better timing and the use of 'bonus runs', time-limited multipliers that massively increase the points you get for each match. Like all the best rhythm action games, success is relatively easy to come by, but actual mastery requires practice, concentration, timing, and learning where best to target your bonus runs. A visualiser mode lets you sit back and listen to the music while fireworks go off. Pretty.Like Geometry Wars, there's a visual payoff. Fireworks light up the sky in brilliant colours and increasingly elaborate displays, which are improved by the addition of new firework designs, unlocked as you complete levels on each of the three difficulty settings. When you activate a bonus run, the whole city finds itself embossed in throbbing greys, and the fireworks start putting more effort in.Each level is built around one piece of music, and while they're all new, composed by a Mr Livingstone (we presume, and EA's press site confirms), they're all derived from well-known classical tunes.

There's William Tell, the 1812 Overture, Ride of the Valkyries, and seven others. The beat-matching takes on regular patterns, as it should, allowing you to navigate certain sections instinctively, and as the difficulty increases, so too does the complexity and the rapidity of the fireworks. As you graduate to Medium and Hard versions of the levels, you have to hit multiple buttons at the same time.BBR also distinguishes itself in the manner of the rockets' ascension. Unlike the Dancing Stage games, these arrows fly at the line from all angles and speeds, forcing you to pay attention to their progress while the music guides your timing. Although ostensibly 2D, with the camera dancing through the sky the trajectories appear to change fluently, and the gameplay avoids the feeling of rigidity that sometimes seeps from its contemporaries. Those who want to be challenged further can also turn to Endurance levels, where you do 'laps' of each tune as the tempo increases by a beat-per-minute every few seconds. There are online leaderboards for everything, of course, and there's already some fierce competition for the top scores on each track in standard and endurance modes, while those of you who prefer to play against yourself can gun for higher ranks, and unlockable gamerpoints built around their collection.

The ten songs can be played in a couple of different ways, but they sort of blur together. There's no one level you'd rave about afterwards.The Achievements are pretty standard, though. There's nothing to compare to Geometry Wars' celebrated 'Pacifism', which turned the game on its head by telling you not to fire, and to stay alive for 60 seconds while the screen filled up with enemies.

The lack of a successor hardly undermines the new game, but it is symptomatic of a wider problem: Boom Boom Rocket is a bit behind the times, and there's nothing particularly distinctive about it.Graphically it's missing something to compare to Geometry Wars' gorgeous undulations. Aurally it's novel, but you won't be rushing out to buy the songs.

And in gameplay terms it has no real kick. Beat-matching is fundamentally compulsive. When it's done right, your fingers start to bypass your brain and react to the prompts like magic. But the best games in the genre have taken this and thrust it in new directions.

Even before Guitar Hero, Harmonix had us dancing across an interstellar fret board in FreQuency and; Gitaroo Man used directional movement; and did away with a bar and used the DS' touch-screen to put the emphasis on position and movement. Even the better games with fancy peripherals aren't reliant on them; the ones that are, like Donkey Konga, are ultimately short-lived.As such BBR is a bit regressive. It's satisfying to play, and certainly proves to be enjoyable and challenging in all the right ways. It also has a two-player mode (sadly not playable over the Internet). The level design makes it apparent that Bizarre has figured out how a rhythm action game should work. But it doesn't build on the developers' aptitude for evolving gameplay, instead focusing on incidentals like fireworks, which aren't incentive enough to continue.

The result is that while it never struggles to be entertaining, it never really stands out either, and ultimately proves rather forgettable. Worth a go, then, but you wouldn't write songs about it.7/10.