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Rocket Bowl (X360)

• Developer: 21-6 Productions
• Publisher: D3 Publisher of America
• Genre: Sports
• Official Website: http://www.xbox.com
• Score: 2 of 5: Strictly Rental

Start with bowling and add a healthy dose of miniature golf. Combine this "miniature bowling" with a 1950s wrapper, rocket boosts, strange courses, and non-standard bowling scoring to get Rocket Bowl - a game that sounds great in theory but never quite lives up to the fun the premise implies.

Four modes are included in Rocket Bowl: Free Play, Challenge, Tournament, and Multiplayer (both local and over Xbox Live). Free Play, Challenge, and Tournament are all single player modes and there's a lot of overlap amongst them. In Free Play you're playing by yourself and earning money for rocket bowling on the game's various courses. Challenge is a 1v1 competition and Tournament is a 4-person contest. Free play games are free to enter while Challenge games carry an entrance fee and tournaments carry an even larger fee for entry. With the money collected in Free Play, Challenge, and Tournament play you'll be able to enter higher-tiered challenges or tournaments and buy more balls with new and better special abilities (additional rocket boosts, additional directions, etc.). The combination of multiple modes and fees seem unnecessary. There's no reason that the game couldn't be tournament mode only for single player with the lowest-tier tournament having no entry fee and a house-provided prize pot (a la Fable II Pub Games). As designed the player must play free play to earn money before entering challenges and earning enough money to enter tournaments.

The bowling mechanic is very simple: aim your shot with the left analog stick, press A to start the power meter, and press A again to shoot your ball toward the pins. Once you're moving you can nudge the ball left and right with the analog. On the first few courses it isn't really necessary as the lanes are mostly flat, but later on when things get wavy and strange the ability to nudge left a bit becomes fairly useful. You've also got rocket boosts at your disposal that send your ball careening left, right, or straight up in the air. Like the nudging rocket boosts aren't particularly useful in the early levels but become more and more valuable as time goes on and courses get more and more odd. The whole thing feels much more like miniature golf than bowling, and the addition of bowling elements get in the way of what could be a great miniature golf game with excellent physics.

Traditional bowling scoring rules are (mostly) in effect here. Key differences are these: you've got three rolls each frame instead of two, and you can use your roll on frame 6 to go pick up stray pins from frame 2 or play ahead and knock over a few from frame 9.

At the end of the day bowling is more fun in person and zany miniature golf has already been done on the Live Arcade service (3D Ultra Minigolf). Forcing the two concepts together is entertaining for a game or two, but you probably won't be back for more.

Oct 13, 2008 | 0 comments
Justin Last