Jett Rocket is a game that's been getting a lot of buzz, mainly due to its outrageous graphics. The WiiWare game from Shin'en (previously known mostly for their licensed output) does have spectacuarly well-realized graphics for a WiiWare game, but does the rest of the game hold up as well? Unfortunately, no.
See, the problem with Jett Rocket isn't necessarily anything that it does wrong. It does quite a bit right in fact. The controls are tight and responsive, the challenge, while not exactly taxing, can be variable depending on your completionist tendencies, and once again, THOSE GRAPHICS. The problem is that it's all so derivative.
See, Mr. Rocket has a bit of an identity crisis, no doubt compounded by the fact that the best 3D platformer of all time (Super Mario Galaxy 2) just released about a month ago. It's definitely a competent platformer, but it certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel.
You play as the titular Jett Rocket, a kind-of creepy looking dude with a jetpack who surveys the Earth from his flying observatory. One day, he's attacked by the Power Plant Posse, a group of environment-destroyers (and probably climate change deniers, those assholes!). That's all a set-up for a very Mario-esque journey, where, now finding himself on the ground, Jett Rocket has to collect solar panels to unlock further lands to traverse.
Jett's not nearly as athletic as Mario, unfortunately, and the game resorts to some unneccessary (although quite responsive) waggling for Jett's main attack, a kind of dash-attack. There's no weapons, but combining the jetpack with the dash attack kind of makes Jett Rocket feel a little bit like Ratchet and Clank, although of course not up to the standards that that game series has lived up to. That's kind of true of the game in general. Most of the time, I was kind of reminded not of Mario's greatest adventures (as it's nowhere near the level of polish or inventiveness of those games) but of PS1-era platformers that tried to capitalize on the 3D platformer craze with healthy dollops of baditude. The baditude is thankfully absent in this game, but the feeling of it being second-rate isn't.
Gameplay consists of running, jumping, jetpacking, collecting, and defeating enemies. The levels are of a "sandbox" variety, in that they're not nearly as propulsive of SMG's levels; they're much more in the Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy vein. As this is a $10 WiiWare game, there's only three worlds, so I'm willing to give the lack of variety a pass. But in those worlds, the levels don't do nearly enough to separate themselves from the other levels, much less the paragons of the genre.
WiiWare as a service is really interesting – there's really creative and awesome uses of the restrictions of the form (see the Bit.Trip series or the LostWinds series), there's other quality games, and there's a lot of cruft, too. Since developers are more or less dependent on the merits of their game to sell them on the platform, it really takes something special to sell your game – the retro futurism of the aforementioned Bit.Trip series or the wind/pointer mechanics of LostWinds are reasons why those games are so well regarded. By copying the "big boys" of the 3D platforming genre, Shin'en didn't do enough to sell their game, and I wouldn't be surprised if the game ends up fading into obscurity once the love-fest for the game's graphics dies down.
Blah. I feel like I'm ripping on this game a little too harshly, because it absolutely is competent and playable, and even fun. But it just doesn't have a single original thought in its pretty little head, and with 242 stars to collect in Super Mario Galaxy 2, why even bother? If you've finished that game and are still jonesing for some 3D platforming action, you could do worse than Jett Rocket, but you can certainly do better, too.