The only story elements that exist in Rocket Panda is that of a rather long song and dance number with lyrics. It has Rocket Panda spinning and twirling with lyrics appearing at the bottom telling the player about how awesome Rocket Panda is. That’s really the extent of a story element when it comes to Rocket Panda. This song and dance number can be seen by selecting “intro” from the title screen.
Rocket Panda is a platformer but a different type of platformer. Instead of running around on platforms, you cruise around in the air on a jetpack. You are tasked with picking up biscuits and tea that are scattered around the stage, and in addition to the tea and biscuits with one special biscuit per stage, there are also three badgers to liberate from their cages.
Collecting the biscuits and freeing the badgers will add to your score once you finish the stage. Though the badgers add to your point total, they also count as lives or hit points. Collect three badgers and you can take up to three hits from enemies or stage hazards. Gathering the tea cups you can do a dash attack, which can be used to take out enemies and breakable walls in order to get to sectioned off stages. It can also be used to quickly get away from an enemy that may be trying to attack you.
Speaking of stages, the game has an intro world with six additional worlds to play through and can be played in any order you like. Each world has it’s own high score and each world features several stages per world with the final stage being a boss stage.
Another added feature to the game is that there is a mini game that has you destroying biscuits in space as Rocket Panda while avoiding an enemy that tries to shoot you down. The game is pretty much the developer’s take on Asteroids and it’s a pretty good game and am glad it’s included.
Rocket Panda features multiple difficulty modes as most retro indies do in this day and age but what is unique about this Sega Genesis/Mega Drive release is that it features achievements. That’s right, the game features achievements. that consist of collecting a certain number of special biscuits and completing a certain number of stages. The fact that achievements. are in the game is pretty awesome and I would like to see more retro indies do this.
Graphically the game has a cartoony look that is not unlike most platformers found on the Genesis/Mega Drive and it fits the game nicely. Each enemy has nice animations as does Rocket Panda himself. Backgrounds are kinda bland with them often being a solid color or consisting of a few colors that are pretty much static with zero animation to them. I am not sure if it’s a memory issue or something that just hadn’t been thought about. I wish the backgrounds had more detail to them like little characters or structures as well as little animations, but sadly, that’s just not the case with this release.
Given the bland backgrounds and subtle animations, the game performs very well. This may be why things like background details and animations were left out. I would gladly have taken a dip in performance if it meant seeing cool backgrounds as I was cruising around on my jetpack collecting biscuits and tea.
Sound is another department that I feel is lacking in Rocket Panda. The background music tracks a tad bit on the repetitive side. I appreciate the fact that a couple tracks try and incorporate the sound of lyrics in the song which is nice. But this is only apparent because of the fact the “music video” is the intro that can be accessed from the title screen. The intro features the lyrics of the song which is one of the songs found in the game as you’re progressing through stages.
I would have liked to have seen there be more tracks in the game with one track per level or maybe a variation of the track for each level of the world with a different song being featured for each world you play through. To make matters worse, the songs are randomly played. So if you die and start the level over again, you could hear a different song instead of the same song. I am not sure if this was due to break up the repetitive nature of the game or just something that wasn’t thought of during development.
Music aside, the sound effects sound pretty good and fit the game nicely. Bullets have a nice pop to them as they are fired from enemies, the dash sparkle sounds magical, but the issue of the background music comes into play here. The issue being that the background music has a tendency to drown out the sound effects quite often.
I realize that I may sound like I am bashing on Rocket Panda; and maybe I am a little. But that doesn’t mean that the game isn’t a ton of fun to play, it just means that it has a few issues, that really all games have to a degree.
Rocket Panda shows that you can take a brand new character and make it into a really cute and fun experience on a retro platform. Rocket Panda is a really unique platforming arcade game that is really a love letter to the games that came before it.
If you’re looking for a fun and unique platformers, or just something new to play on your Mega Drive/Genesis, then you gotta check out Rocket Panda!
Disclaimer: A review version was provided.
You can check out the game here
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.