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)
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)
Reviewed on Mar 31, 2023