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With character progression, lots of weapons and different objectives for every level, Rocketmen: Axis of Evil makes a lot of promises. With a bird's eye view of the action, and nearly constant shooting in any direction at waves and waves of bad guys coming from cramped hallways to fill up every open space, Rocketmen will remind old-timers of Smash TV. But there's a lot more to this game. At the start, you'll create a character from several different classes like a warrior, engineer or Venetian, and choose a gender, skin color, hair color and outfit. It's not the deepest tool in the world, but it's more than enough to make a character you feel is your own. Once you're ready, the story begins. It's all done with campy cell-shaded artwork and dialogue that is hit or miss, but more clever than not. The scenes may run a little long, but generally there's just enough of a story to set up the carnage of the next mission. While some of the jokes are definite groaners they're delivered in a way that makes the whole thing come off as a spoof.
You'll start off with a weak blaster that fires in any direction and for as long as you point the thumb stick. You'll move with the other stick and navigate your way through hallways and open spaces, mowing down aliens as fast as possible. Along the way, there are buttons to push, prisoners to rescue, mines to disarm, and so on. The more enemies you take out, the more loot they drop. Along the way, you'll also pick up special weapons with great variety: shotguns, rocket launchers, several kinds of mines, gun turrets, grenades, machine guns, guns that shoot little spinning blades that bounce around - lots of guns. Each one has a clock that starts ticking the moment you pick it up. Once you're out of time, the gun is gone. At the end of a level, you can spend all that loot you picked up on upgrades like speed, armor, gun power, more time to use special guns... the list of upgrades is long and it's easy to get hooked. Working against any Rocketmen addiction is the fact that the camera has a horrible habit of pulling you past objectives you haven't finished yet, so there's no backtracking. And given a choice of two different routes, you better make a decision you can live with because the camera's not letting you go where you want. It also cuts off parts of rooms it doesn't want you to see once you've moved to certain spots. In general, the camera is what's keeping Rocketmen from being a ton of fun. But it's still a nice diversion and fits very well into an Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network collection.
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