rocket arena is a game that odds are, despite being very recent and by a major publisher, you havent heard of and double not played, it came and went in a flash, being reduced down to $5 within a month of release and being ps plus fodder eventually, which didnt even help the playerbase that much, it was by most metrics a bomb(lol) but i don't think it deserved to be, while on the surface it does seem like an overwatch clone with a name similar to a much lesser multiplayer game it's actually a lot more than that and is one of the most interesting multiplayer games i think i've ever played. what makes it interesting is in the basic premise, it's not a traditional hero shooter where you die upon taking too much damage, rather it has a lot more in common with something like smash, instead of a health gage you have a blast gage, when this hits its peak you go flying out of the stage, but you don't need to lose all your health for this, you can just be launched anyway with some clever aiming and positioning by your enemy and vice versa, some of the games items and abilities are like this too, sending you flying and making you an easier target for ringouts, it gives it a very different playstyle, doubly so with the way aiming works. aiming in this is an auto-aim deal, you have an autotarget that you can adjust around the enemy and you have to work with this to hit them, it means that you're always shooting at them and they're always trying to dodge and it makes for a fun back and fourth, especially since most projectiles, i think all of them are non-hitscan and can be dodged, they work much more similarly to a lot of older FPS games in that regard, all having different travel times, you even have a fighting game burst in order to get out of combos, and the game has combos! there's a lot of trad fighting game in that way, all the abilities will allow you for a very limited number of combos, for example rev who can ram them with her charge, stick them with a granade and then start shooting them into a ringout, there's some depth there and it plays a lot more inspired vs a lot of other hero shooters or smash clones.

the cast all plays interestingly too, everyone has different weapons and cooldown abilities but everyone is free from the start so you can find your main with no issues, the designs can be a little generic but in a way that feels almost like a lost ps2 era licenced game it feels like a ps2 kids game in that way and its charming! but they're all mostly fun to use, i had to level a few up to 25 for my plat and i chose, jayto (the basic one, posterboy but he has a cool transformation mode and his rockets are fun to use), ampora (charge shot and homing missiles with a fun stingray movement ability), leef (stuns and a charge beam that you can use after you hit 4 times), kayi (mostly a charge crossbow and movement abilities) and rev (a vehicle that can jump 3 times, charge enemies with and a sticky granade) who i got up to level 100 for the platnum, i did try some other characters i liked a lot like plik (who has a teleport and a machinegun but he was just too hard to use since he required close range) and flux (who uses robot catbombs and has invisibility but i was just awful at using her :( ) there's a ton of variety in playstyles for how big the cast is and as they kept releasing them they kept getting more intricate, especially with flux and the golden gryhon, who are more complex than the rest of the cast by far.

the graphical style is very disney-esque, they even reference frozen in some of the reveal trailers for the game and the maps are all very colourful and fun. there's western desert maps along a traintrack, snowy villages, witchy towns, a few underwater levels that look amazing and some cool futuristic zones, there's a lot of map variety here, though you may not see them all now, there's a few maps, mostly one of the two desert maps and a variation of the futuristic map, that just don't show up in rotation at all, but they can be seen in the private match section if you'd like to explore them, and they're all so detailed that i would reccomend it. the music is really nice too! i have some of the pre-game music stuck in my head even now, amporas theme is my personal favourite, it's so calming and the piano in the track is just nice, boones theme is also really cool, sounds like it could be in a ty the tasmanian tiger game and kayi's theme is a perfect winter song, could easily fit in a top tier 3D platformer as well, the tracks all play after matches in the main menu so you'll hear them a lot and you'll have a chance to sample them all because there's really only around 10 of them, they can get a little repetitive, if you don't want to play the game they're all on youtube and listenable and i'd reccomend it!

the one big downside to playing it now is, sadly, that you'll be doing it in a limited set of modes with bots only, i encountered a few people and even had a full team once or twice but compared to the ps plus days the game is just all but dead, you can play it fine with bots and have a blast (lmao) but i know that to some thats a deal breaker, but for me i don't mind, sure you may not get to experiance every map and mode, though you can in private match if you can get enough people together, but you can try out the full breadth of the games mechanics and still have a very good time, and with how cheap the game is, why not give it a try! you even get a lot of ingame currency with new physical copies which are sold in abundance, enough to get a few cool skins from the, admittedly sleazy, cash shop. that's kind of where the games legacy ends too, with empty bot matches, it had support seemingly until 2022 when the golden gryphon was added and after that just dropped, the servers are still up and the game even had a double xp weekend there where i was able to grind until platnum but thats about it, i wish some stuff like a pre-game lobby with the ability to skip maps and modes, i hated the coin mode because of how slow it could be, and the first person mode from the initial trailers would have been amazing, but i guess it wasn't meant to be. the devs have an unnanounced game that i'll for sure check out and they also did some support work on fortnite, but thats kind of all, no games before or after, though some of the people that worked on it were involved in some really cool things! dev madan, the games art director was involved with a ton of classic 3D platformers like sly cooper, rocket: robot on wheels and even a recent crash bandicoot game, as well as a ton of putt-putt and freddi fish games and the composer, jack wall, had worked on tons of cool games like lost planet 3, jade empire and the mass effect series! the studio has a lot of great talent behind it and i hope they go places, it's just a shame a cool game like this never caught on as well as it should have.