Rktcr Review

Let me start off by saying that as a reviewer, I truly enjoy a good challenge. That being said, some games seem to take difficulty to a level that no one can enjoy. Rktcr or Rocketcar, as it’s pronounced, is a physics-based platformer that makes a game like Dark Souls look like a jolly walk in the park. You control a small car with rockets that you must learn to master through some unique mechanics that will intrigue and frustrate you at the same time. There is both a story mode and challenge mode to make you pull the hair from your head.

In Rktcr you control a rocket-propelled car that must navigate through a variety of levels using portals to take you to each new part of the map. Unlike most platform games, this one is, in a sense, more calculating and experiment-based than others. The true idea behind this game is to make the perfect run and achieve the best time, not just beating the level. The gameplay is simple to learn, however mastering it is an entirely different story.

Using the rewind time feature you can choose the best trajectory for your car to take. The game provides an interesting tool to help you figure out exactly where your car is going to end up by showing a real-time path your car will take if you keep moving forward through time. This path shows you exactly how each change in rocket propulsions will affect the movement of your car. You may also use the Shift and CTRL keys to speed up or slow down time so that you can move quickly or slowly between parts of the map.

While all of this may sound like a unique twist to platform games, it actually had a detrimental effect on my overall experience. After getting over the novelty of being able to rewind time the levels and challenges begin to feel quite boring. It began to feel tedious going through each level and figuring out how to beat it by simply rewinding time whenever I made a mistake. The game began to take on a very slow pace that just wasn’t for me. This doesn’t mean that Rktcr is an easy game by any means, in fact it’s one of the hardest platformers I have played by far. You have a number of factors to consider and a variety of different techniques that you can use to beat the challenge time, or navigate a particularly annoying.

Fortunately for me I found out that a developer had uploaded YouTube videos showing the various techniques you can use in order to beat challenging levels. He showed various ways of using your momentum to propel your car in unique ways and redirect the force of your car so that you can sail through the air. The problem with these awesome tutorials is that you pretty much have to watch them in order to figure out the basics of the game alone. The in-game tutorial did not cover even half of the various techniques you will need to learn in order to move forward. To me this seems rather short-minded as you should never have to go on YouTube in order to learn how to play a game properly.

Rktcr is a game that is difficult enough to not appeal to the majority of players out there. Even after learning quite a few of the proper techniques I found myself getting bored with the slow mechanics involved with rewinding time, just to find the perfect trajectory. If you are someone who likes a slow-paced platform/puzzle game, then Rktcr might be for you. Unfortunately I found rewinding time repeatedly tedious and completing challenges did not feel rewarding because of this mechanic. Rktcr isn’t necessarily a bad game, but its main mechanics make the game feel extremely slow and will definitely not be for those that enjoy a fast-paced platformer.