Feature Art

Wavey The Rocket PC Review

There really is nothing else quite like Wavey The Rocket. I feel like I say that a lot. Perhaps because I tend to review mostly Indie games; passion projects made by creative, innovative people that want to try something new and interesting, but here it rings especially true – what a unique game. For now, at least. I’m sure we’ll see more like it in the future and we’ll have to call them ‘Wavey-likes’, or something equally obscene, but for now I have found it incredibly tasking to categorise, which eventually culminated in me defeatedly tagging it as a ‘sidescroller’; because the screen scrolls to the side? (Not exactly genre-defining), and ‘platformer’; because it’s about avoiding obstacles and moving up and down. We have become slaves to SEO and YouTube algorithms that rely on consistent chunking methods for quickly organising media and, when thrown into those black boxes, these sparks of unfiltered imagination lose their soul, their essence. Wavey The Rocket is a new type of game, it’s a wave-former…a side-scrolling wave-former.

Basically, by distancing the player’s normally direct control of the main character through a layer of obfuscation, which instead has them manipulating the frequency and amplitude of a wave that Wavey tracks, an entirely new type of challenge is created. And it is most definitely a challenge, particularly when starting off. Is it fun though? Well, yes and no. It starts out by presenting this awesome, novel idea – an entirely new way to think and play and rolls with that for a while, showing off all the way. Sadly, however, it quickly devolves into the most basic and unoriginal form of ramping the difficulty in games, which is to say focusing way too heavily on precision instead of introducing more new mechanics and/or movement options that can be built on. There are some areas (the best ones) that throw a wrench in the works, such as the dark levels and the need to cool down from overheating in another, but too frequently does a level boil down to ‘can you get through these tiny gaps?’, ‘what if we make them really narrow and long, so you have to get through perfectly all the way to the end’.

I just don’t find repetition built on trial and error that fun, to me it’s tedious and frustrating. The challenges to acquire the three gems in each stage I pretty much loved, though (where the checkpoints were reasonable, anyway). They are the epitome of Wavey’s gameplay and more than anything else, more than the strangely exploitable mini-game challenges and even more than the exciting boss fights, push a player to be better. Many of them even seem impossible to reach until a little ingenuity and testing uncovers a slightly new way to control the wave or dash in just the right way to pluck the shiny reward and taste victory. On the other hand, when they are placed really far past a checkpoint they can often be aggravating to even attempt because of the routine of having to make it all the way back each time, which mostly just led to me leaving them behind and hoping for the next one to be better designed.

Design is a very important topic here, actually. Whereas the sound design is excellent, pumping out track after groovy track throughout the campaign, the 3D graphics and colouring are somewhat of a problem. Besides the neon glowing wave itself nothing really ‘pops’ off the screen, generally making it pretty dull to look at, but most importantly making it hard to see obstacles, which is only exacerbated when they start to move in and out of the foreground. There is variation in the levels between worlds but honestly, besides the gimmicks of each of them, such as the snakes and the claw arms, they all kind of blur together in my mind. There’s also no clear shape to Wavey, so exploding when attempting to make some of the tighter corners is dissatisfying in the ‘I don’t feel it was my fault’ kind of way. Where precision is key players need full visibility and a complete information set for it to feel truly just when they make a mistake.

When it’s all said and done, my main quarrel with all of these issues is that they are holding this super concept back from reaching anywhere near its potential and it’s just such a shame to see. Wavey The Rocket has its ups and downs, it’s crests and troughs, if you will, but it is still a good game at its core. There are just a few rough edges that need to be worked on and status quos to break free of. Instead of trying to fit this new idea into an established space, like a wavey peg into a conventionally-shaped hole, I wanted to see it go further, to think bigger! We don’t need ridiculous storylines about Rockets having the fizz from their soda stolen to propel us through the game, or have to follow what has come before. Drawn out levels with checkpoints feel like maybe they aren’t quite the right fit for this type of game, maybe shorter stages with compact challenges are the way to go. Perhaps introducing wave cancelling to defeat enemies by matching up patterns would be fun, or ripping it all apart and building it up as a rhythm game is actually where we’d find the most compelling gameplay take root. All I know is I want to see more of what can be done here, where will they go and what will they accomplish next with ‘The Waveformer’.

6 out of 10