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This review first appeared in E1, October 1993.
The current trend of cute-looking, but intrinsically hard characters continues with Konami’s Rocket Knight Adventures. This shrew-like rodent is blessed with a missile-slinging sword and a rocket pack: if his weapon isn’t enough to get him out of danger, he can power-up his pack and hurtle, meteor-like, across the screen.
Rocket Knight Adventures delivers a mixture of platform jumping interspersed with swift scrolling sections, so that – on your first few goes at least – you’re never quite sure what’s coming up next.
The game’s jolly graphics belie a tour-de-force of excellence: impressive parallax-scrolling, pallete switching, swirling heat-haze backdrops, huge multi-segmented enemies and a variety of clever graphical trickery – at one stage you can only see your target platform by its reflection in the pool of lava below. Only when the lava swells up can you see where to jump. Devious, huh?
Gameplay is pretty much spot-on, with just the right amount of platform action and enemies, plus a nicely balanced difficulty curve. But sadly it sticks to the same old level-boss, level-boss structure (like nine out of ten Mega Drive games) so no marks for innovation there.
In typical Konami style, there are several difficulty levels, and on easy you can slice through half the game in one go. But, if you can restrain your cheating tendencies, Rocket Knight Adventures provides a good blast and a neat twist on the aged platform theme. [7]