This fast action/RPG presents a fresh, highly enjoyable new concept.

Reviewed by mswanco on May 11, 2007  |  report this review

Rocket Slime will only entertain you for about ten hours, and that's if you want to get a 100% completion. Despite its length, this game is incredibly addictive and lots of fun.
You play the eponymous Rocket, a slime from the Dragon Quest series this game is a shoot off from. You come from Boing Village, a bustling town rescently ransacked and kidnapped of all its inhabitants. To your fortune, you remain the lone slime against an army, trying to rescue all one-hundred of your captured friends, family, and townmates.

At first, the game presents a pretty traditional, simple action/adventure gameplay element. You have HP and can attack enemies with the push of a button. Soon after you start, however, you experience the true genius behind the Rocket Slime formula: tank battles.

When coming in contact to certain boss enemies, you'll be challenged to a tank battle. After summoning your gigantic "Schleiman Tank," which looks like a slime-shaped castle on treads, to accept the challenge, you start a frantic, unique endeavor to destory your opponents tank before he does the same to yours. To do this, you must grab a myriad of objects from your tank's ammo chute and place them in your cannons. After the items are shot from the cannons, you can watch them propel towards the enemy on the DS' top screen. Most of the time, your fodder will be blocked by your opponents own shots (you and your opponent can only shoot at two different angles.) But when an item finally connects with the rival tank, it will deal a varying ammount of damage. The purpose of this skirmish is to reduce the enemy tank's HP to 0, travel across the battlefield to the tank, enter it, and destroy its heart shaped engine. As the game progresses, more elements come into play that can help you master your technique for beating your opponents. Upgrades, healing items, and AI-controlled crew members make the battles an intense, customizable experience. You can even infiltrate your enemy's tank, either by traveling across the battlefield and entering through the front door or by shooting yourself from a cannon into the tank's control room, and destroy equipment and hinder your enemy's performance.

Essentially, every aspect of playing through the traditional levels revolves around bettering your tank. You can collect a diverse collection of items to use as ammo and you can capture enemies to eventually convert into allies to help you man your tank. There's also a simple yet sophisticated alchemy system that you can use to create all new items to use for varying types of ammo.

I really hope Square-Enix takes this concept and uses it in future games. Tank battles are intense, frantic, and fun. Without this element, I wouldn't be sold on this game at all.