The story Follows Hardboiled Chicken, The Cock of War, must rise against Putski, the evil penguin dictator. I couldn’t make that up if I wanted to. Thankfully the people at Ratloop, Inc. did the job for us. Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken also contains a co-op story where you and a partner (offline or online) play as two of six budgie commandos on a mission to save the General’s Daughter.
Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken sports a classic 2D platformer style, with you spending just as much time shooting enemies as trying to figure out how to reach your destination. Some puzzles require you to move boxes to jump on ledges or even taking control of an enemies mind in order to push a button out of your reach. You do have a health and ammo bar, but since each enemy killed drops ammo and getting shot during a firefight will render you completely unable to get back up, as the enemies decide to take turns burst firing at you. The game brings just enough challenge in the firefights to make you think of how to move and who to take out. Some areas also have crevices in the background in which you can dodge fire. The game also features some air firefights where you control your direction and aim with the mouse while shooting down penguins with jet packs and helicopter blades.
The co-op campaign requires the players to jump onto each other's shoulders in order to reach some platforms since they are only half the height of all the other birds in the game. Having two characters makes the firefights more strategic as just surrounding the enemy or remaining back to back won't be some easy strategy to finish all firefights.
Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken has a decent amount of dialogue, where in game comes up as text boxes while the character speaking warbles. Yes, actually warbles like the birds they are. Cut scenes feature English dubs, as well as subtitles for the hearing impaired. The visuals are well designed with themes ranging from prisons and factories, to jungles and open sky and space. Yea that's right, space. Your mission to take down the evil penguin Putski traverses all the way to space.
Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is developed well enough to run on lower-end pc’s (below even that of low end gaming pc) but players might find it difficult to follow the cut scenes on these low end Computers. Regardless, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is a game any platformer lover should pick up.
Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken was developed by Ratloop Asia Pte LTD and published by Reverb Publishing for the PS3 and PC on October 15th, 2012. It currently retails for $10 on steam. A PC copy of the game was given by Reverb Publishing for review purposes.
