Rock Station

Wow, they sure did spend a lot of time establishing a plot in the beginning of this game.  I sure hope they don't immediately drop it as soon as gameplay starts...

womp.
womp.
wooooooomp.

But I digress.  Remember all those space shooters like CUB3 and the other ones whose names I don't feel like digging through my archives to remember?  Rock Station is that except instead of fighting a bunch of enemies designed to be enemies (you know the kind, like the little ones that take 1 hit to kill and those big leviathan battle cruisers), you fight AI-controlled ships that are all playable.  It's like a fighting game, but in space and with lasers.

The game uses the same basic control scheme as CUB3 and Star Wars: Battlefront, you know.  That lot.  It works decently when you figure out how to use it, but it's not without its problems.  First off, I had no idea how much health I had, but I was pretty sure I was getting hit more often that I was landing hits, so shouldn't I have lost that battle?  Well I didn't.  My opponent was turned into space dust.

Anyway, aiming your lasers is a bitch because they barely travel faster than the ship (which I guess would make sense, considering we're dealing with faster-than-light travel), so by the time you've figured out how far ahead of your opponent you have to aim in order to hit them, they've made some sort of sharp turn that you couldn't hope of pulling off in your wildest dreams, and once again, you're left to try desperately to figure out how to get behind an opponent while they're zipping around like mosquitoes and you're trying to deal with the world's least helpful GUI.

The graphics are nice, though.  The characters are all incredibly stylized anime characters that look like they were drawn professionally.  Apart from that, it's good to see 3D art that doesn't look like it could be accurately recreated with a few sheets of construction paper (looking at you, Robox).  And speaking of Robox, the sound effects in this game didn't want to make me release a pack of savage mini wolves into my ears to claw away at my cochlea.   However, it does get a tad bit grating listening to the same "pew pew" effect over and over and over again.  Some background music wouldn't have gone amiss, that's for damn sure.

So yeah.  Rock Station is a fun game, and I definitely prefer it to the other space shooters on this list, if for no other reason than it's much more satisfying to blow up your fellow man in a universe you understand than it is to blow up a faceless, nameless battle cruiser with no sense of context whatsoever.  However, it's not without its flaws, and I can't recommend it to everyone.  Perhaps I've become too hard to impress.  After all, I was brought up on Starfox 64, and I've never had dogfights quite as fun or satisfying as the ones to be had therein.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, keep on rockin

Links
But there's no sound in space: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=513