When developing their first game, Sucker Punch had a lot of faith in Sprocket (the original name for Rocket, before trademarks got in the way). When pitching the game, they impressed some publishers, including EA who wanted to take them on board to make a PS2 game, which would mean getting rid of their earlier work. They stuck with their original plan and showed the game themselves at E3, with UbiSoft picking up the game for publishing.

Unfortunately, it’s kind of a forgotten game. It was released in a period where the N64 got a lot of 3D platformers, in between big names like Rayman and Donkey Kong. Which is a shame, as it’s a fantastic game.

Rocket: Robot on Wheels takes place in a futuristic circus theme park. You play as a simple unicycle robot who’s left in charge of looking after it, the night before opening. Unfortunately, a sly racoon called Jojo, who is fed up of being cooped up in a cage and being second fiddle to the star of the park, escapes and wreaks havoc. It’s up to Rocket to fix things before the park is over. Naturally, this includes lots of collectables across the game’s seven levels (plus the hub world, which is a level in itself).

Rocket has an interesting move set. His wheeled movement feels good and is precise to control, with one key feature being his anti-gravity arm. He can use this to pick up objects and throw them around, which is a key part of puzzles. Throughout the game, you’ll unlock a few more abilities – although I was hoping for a few more. This does give the game a very unique feel, which extends to the rest of the game.

The one major issue, though, is the camera. It moves a set amount each time you press a button, but if a wall is in the way, it will jerk around a much bigger amount until the wall is no longer in the way. If you try to adjust in a corridor, the camera will likely to a 180 turn. It’s frustrating at times, but the game is strong enough that it’s worth putting up with it.

What Rocket excels at is giving you new stuff to do within each level. Not only does each level have a different structure and feel, but there’s lots of variety within each level as well. Take the first level – which is a quite small (but open) theme park.

The outer ring of the level is a beach. There’s a couple of platforming segments – such as one that introduces Rocket’s ability to grab onto grapple points and swing- but the main important thing is the car you can find and drive around. Up the ramp is a building that houses a linear platforming challenge, and nearby is a roller coaster you have to repair.

What’s great here is that, once you repair it, you can create your own rollercoaster. You can add heights, dips, loops, and even cross over parts of the track. There’s a challenge to get through five points in the correct order, plus other setups you have to do to collect tokens. The innermost part of the level houses some minigames (good practice for the throw ability) and a giant t-rex that needs to be repaired. There’s a lot packed in, and more than what I’ve described here.

One big aspect of these levels is finding seven parts of a machine which will fix part of that level, which then has various effects. In most levels, it opens up a new significant part of a level, but others can have interesting effect, such as unlocking night/day switches that completely change the level from a lovely green area to a nightmarish lava filled world. Getting the machine parts and completing the challenge that follows will net you tickets, but there are a lot more.

Each world has 12 tickets to collect. These are lettered A – L and the pause menu will give you hints on how to get them. There’s a lot of interesting things to do. The last one in each world, however, is trickier. For that, you need to collect 200 tokens in each world. These often come in sets of 5 and 10, but individual ones also exist. I was very impressed with how Rocket remembers which ones you had (a lot of games at the time reset the collectables), and as the levels don’t overstay their welcome, mopping up the remaining ones isn’t too much of a chore, making this a great game to 100% complete.

There’s a ton of stuff I haven’t touched on (such as how unique each vehicle is), because there’s a lot of elements to Rocket: Robot on Wheels, but it all fits together extremely well. It’s a brilliant game, and especially amazing when it was this developer’s first ever game. It’s a shame that this got massively overlooked when it first came out, as it deserves way more attention.

Fave

What’s most surprising, though, is that Sucker Punch are first-time developers, so, if Rocket is anything to go by, they’ve got a bright future ahead of them. A game in the mould of Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, Rocket is inventive, imaginative and stuffed full of rewarding and enjoyable activities.

Jes Bickham, N64 Magazine #36. 88%

Remake or remaster?

Rocket would massively benefit from a remaster. Just spruce up the graphics a little bit (without changing too much), fix the camera, and perhaps add an slightly better finale to the game.

Official ways to get the game.

There’s no official way to get Rocket: Robot on Wheels.