PC - Steam
(9/10)

What i liked :

oh boy, lately i have been revisiting games i played when i was young, most of them sort of disappointed, nostalgia is a real mistress, but this one, its just as good if not even better than i remember.

the music, i've had this game soundtrack in my playlist for more than a decade, its that good, specially illuminate me, i recomend giving the music video a check, if you like that song, you will love this game, this game is basically a big album advertizement and god ! it works !

the story is metal gear viva la revolution, something straight out of adult swim, fully animated and gorgeously handcrafted, if cuphead got so famous because of its animated feature, i think people should give this game a fair chance.

its short, i remember playing it for days when i was young and having a hard time, but as an adult i finished it in about 4 hours, thats not a bad thing as you can find this game for a dollar most of the time, its almost always on sale.

hardboiled is one of my favorite characters for its unapologetic badassery, it doesn't feel edgy, my homie smiles for children and kicks cannibal hawks.

it plays like a modern action adventure, similar to the likes of flashback and blackthorne, but much more fast pace and fluid.

it has both couch and online coop, i ain't playing it, but i'm happy its there.

What i didn't liked :

surprisingly, not much, the last boss was a bit annoying with the way you have to defeat him but everything felt very satisfying

Nota não necessária sobre esta resenha, mas que achei apropriado: estou escrevendo enquanto ouço a maravilhosa trilha sonora desse jogo, da banda New World Revolution.

Bom, vamos lá! Eu não sei como Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken foi parar na minha biblioteca de jogos, mas ele estava lá e eu achei o nome engraçado. A princípio fiquei meio desconfiado, pois é um jogo com temática militar, tem armas, tem tiro, tem bombas. Geralmente não é uma combinação que me atrai muito. Segui em frente pois queria ver onde eu ia parar nessa plataforma 2D. E não é que eu me diverti no fim das contas? Hardboiled Chicken não vai ficar na minha memória, mas não me arrependo das quase 4 horas que passei pra zerar.

O primeiro ponto positivo é a trilha sonora. Como mencionei acima, ela é toda feita pela banda New World Revolution e me agradou bastante. Fui jogando enquanto curtia esse rock estilo Malhação do início dos anos 2000. As músicas encaixam bem no tom do jogo e complementam a experiência. A história de Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken tem os seus momentos: apesar de ser bem clichê, temos plot twists, temos humor, temos drama, temos de tudo. O jogo, no geral, não é muito difícil, apenas requer movimentos rápidos e um pouco de raciocínio pra entender os parcos quebra-cabeças distribuídos nas fases. Geralmente, o jogador só precisar andar e matar tudo que aparecer na sua frente, então ele é bem direto nesse quesito.

Uma mecânica do jogo que me chamou a atenção foi que, em um certo ponto, você recebe uma arma que te dá o poder de controlar a mente de seus inimigos. Ela é necessária pra vencer diversos obstáculos ao longo do jogo e é bem divertido matar seus comparsas sem que eles esperassem que viesse um ataque.

Eu disse que é necessário ter uma resposta rápida nesse jogo, não disse? Pois você tem que ser bem rápido às vezes. Como é um jogo em que você tem que atirar no seu inimigo, quem sacar a arma primeiro vai ter uma vantagem grande. O jogo às vezes peca em não ser tão responsivo, então pode ser que isso te cause um pouco de frustração. Mas ele salva automaticamente em muitos pontos importantes, então fique tranquilo: é só tentar de novo.

O grande ponto negativo pra mim foram as fases em que você tem um jetpack e tem que voar enquanto atira nos seus inimigos. Os controles definitivamente são muito ruins e eu não conseguia direcionar meu personagem e acabava morrendo muitas vezes por descuido. Se eu pudesse mudar algo nesse jogo, eu tiraria as fases de jetpack.

Eu recomendo Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken se você quer curtir um jogo e ouvir umas músicas boas ao mesmo tempo. Matar pinguins malignos que querem dominar o mundo enquanto você controla uma galinha gigante bombada traz um novo conceito de jogo que alivia a tensão, sabe?

The ethos of Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken can best be seen in the various flying sections found throughout its relatively short campaign. A simple, glossy overview would say that a 2D sidescroller dogfighting section has to control snappy, feel responsive, and make you feel like you're always in control. Rocketbirds completely ignores this. Your first impressions of these sections will vary depending on what platform you play this game on (more on that later). But the agreed-upon consensus will probably be frustration. Your ability to move around in the air is based on your ability to hold down the button that activates your jetpack; your ability to shoot in the air depends entirely on what direction you're moving around in. For first-time players, this can be difficult to get used to. Especially on a gamepad, it's very easy to miss your targets entirely. But if repeat visits to this game have taught me anything, it's that that's the point. There's a joy in besting this control scheme that those initial impressions leave off the table. Everything feels like a constant, cyclical struggle. You'd be on the ground if you wanted to be in control. In the air, you are the bitch of gravity. Kicking gravity in the face, the space between you and the bastards you're after shrinks to almost nothing.

Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is a game that you will either have a bizarre eminent fascination with, or it won't click with you. This is a game filled to the brim with 90s attitude and design limitations, powered by MySpace-era alternative rock, and made by someone who had been wanting to make it for a very, very long time. It's Blackthorne by way of Tony Scott, making the least subtle WWII allegory possible via Saturday mornings on Cartoon Network. Movement is very slow, the cover system can get a bit tedious, platforming isn't a smooth affair, and you can only aim in the direction your character is facing. This is all intentional. Like the air sections I mentioned above, it all serves to put you in the position of the chaser. The guy you're after is the Terminator (down to the cheesy Schwarzenegger impression) and you're John Connor, but you're chasing him. You might consider this a misunderstanding of how action games work; Leon Kennedy is fast in Resident Evil 4 because if he was as slow as Mr. X, that opening village sequence wouldn't feel as intensely satisfying. As an expression of gratitude for cinema through the lens of a game, this is a far more faithful affair than a lengthy cutscene could provide. To plagiarize one of the most mocked terms in games writing as of late, it succeeds in making you feel like the unstoppable force that so many children must have saw Arnie as when they watched The Terminator for the first time, to the chagrin of their parents when that one scene came on. It's for this reason that the decision to add a Co-Operative mode almost seems baffling to me. If both parties are fine with what I've described, great. But I've yet to meet someone like that. Regardless of how you perceive this game to play, though, it's total eye candy to look at twelve years later. There is a good reason this thing shipped with the option to play it not only with a 3D TV but also with those cheap red-and-blue glasses you used to get in those old DVDs and movie theaters. My bet is that it has very little to do with Sony's attempt to push 3D technology into gaming at the time, not only because many of these options are still present in the PC version but also because I don't think Sony ever considered those flimsy glasses a suitable alternative. The main reason it's there is that the art style blends 2.5D backgrounds with stunning hand-drawn animation to great effect. It might not be on the same level as something like Cuphead, but this is a must-play if you dig cartoon art styles and don't mind the clunk and somewhat childish humor.

Outside of the gameplay and visuals, though, the other elephant in the room is the soundtrack. Behind me on a shelf full of CDs is the physical release of this game's soundtrack that came with the Limited Run Games release of its PlayStation Vita port. I still listen to it regularly. If Rocketbirds flawlessly succeeds at one thing, it's using the music at its disposal to bolster its set pieces and cinematics. A lot gets said about how incredible its opening cutscene is, but even something as silly and stupidly edgy as the background of this game's titular protagonist is given more weight than it otherwise would have had because of the music the developers chose to use. The operative term there is 'chose': when I described this game's soundtrack as being from the MySpace era, I wasn't being facetious. This might not shock you, but almost half of this game's soundtrack comes from an album by New World Revolution that came out four years before Hardboiled Chicken, and two before the flash version of Rocketbirds that Hardboiled Chicken is technically a remake of. From what can be gathered from the band's presence on Bandcamp, all but one song appears in Hardboiled Chicken, and the only song that doesn't is in the sequel. The resulting effect of this is that these developers have perfectly tuned each song to the setpieces they've built around them. If you want a good example of how much they nailed it, the remixes they inevitably use in the game are total bangers.

I don't know if it's exactly right to rate this thing so high, seeing as its appeal is very specific. But I absolutely adored this thing back then, and my opinion on that has hardly changed.

(As an additional aside, you know that PS Vita copy I mentioned? It's almost completely different from the version that was released on the PS3 and PC in 2011 and 2012, respectively. But I'll have more to say about that at some other point in the future)

I didn't know I wanted to play a chicken John Wick simulator set in the world of the music video for Feel Good Inc, but this one ended up being a fun time!

Admittedly the first third or so was a bit of a struggle to get through. A lot of the early game has no music, so you are just left with the deliberately grungy art style and the character voices; the voice acting is, frankly... pretty awful to be honest. Thankfully the voice acting is few and far between, but it all adds to a slightly oppressive and unwelcoming atmosphere to the early game.

I was also pretty worried about the gameplay. The first few levels made it seem pretty damn one-note; sure you got access to multiple weapons fairly early on, but the strategy for every enemy was just 'mash shoot until they die'; no more nuance was required or even available. But it really grew into itself as the game progressed: different enemy types to be fought in different ways, different weapons that actually feel different, mind control, grenades, etc. etc. The game stays fairly easy despite all this, but it does well at the 'making you feel like a badass' thing it's going for.

But I was most surprised to find myself drawn into the ridiculous world the game is set in. The humour can be hit or miss, but the game is loaded with little details and visual gags that really give it some character. The music when present is actually pretty decent, and I loved the cutscenes styled as full music videos; I felt like it could get annoying but never did and perfectly fit. Overall, a surprise thumbs up from me for this one.