Some of us enjoy games with complicated control systems, and the incredibly fine control that accompany them. We had an arcade cabinet in our rec room at home when I was growing up (don’t hate me!) for an old black and white arcade game entitled simply “Tank”. It had two sticks for movement, one for each tank track. To go forward you would slam them both up. To go forward while slowly turning to the right, you would push the left stick all the way up, and the right stick up less. To spin in place, push one forward, the other back. It was no twin-stick shooter, to actually shoot you had to let go of one of the sticks and hit a button, quickly returning that hand to the stick to dodge incoming fire. I loved it, and I was good at it.
More recently, I enjoyed a game called “Hover Strike” on the Atari Jaguar in the early ’90s. It was a hovercraft game with controls so complex that it gave you the option to plug in a second gamepad and have a second person control half of the hovercraft for you to make it more reasonable. Loved that one too.
For a more modern example, when I started playing “World of Tanks” on the Xbox 360 I went through all the control systems, and found that the most complicated one was the most to my liking. Not because I’m a masochist or a show-off, but because with a bit of practice I could pull off deft movements that I couldn’t with an easier, but less precise, control scheme.
That all brings us to today’s game. “Little Rocket Girl” is for that person who loved “Combat Flight Simulator”, but didn’t care for “Crimson Skies”. It’s not meant to be a pick-up-and-play experience, it’s meant to be something that takes an investment of practice and rewards you with incredibly fine controls and (more) realistic physics.
And that may be hard to get across in an 8 minute trial, but it’s a scrolling shooter (horizontally and vertically) with a physics model and rewarding gameplay for those willing to invest the time.
Here’s what the publisher (Toolkitz) has to say about the game:
“In a far off, dystopian world, there are two kinds of humans: the Unlimited who possess free will and the limited who do not. KANA is a young, limited girl who one day has broken away from her servitude programming and has stolen a rocket pack. She sets off to kill the Empress.”
Writings of Mass Deduction 