Konami has quite a back catalog of titles to draw from today, as evidenced by their various ’Rebirth’ games and being among the first to sign on with the Game Room service. Their latest effort along these lines is Rocket Knight, part of a series of games featuring a humanoid oppossum armed with a sword, armor, and a jet pack. The series goes all the way back to the Genesis and Super Nintendo era, and today’s Rocket Knight is essentially a 2D platformer (albeit with 3D graphics) much like its predecessors. While your character cannot truly fly, he can use the jet pack to make quick bursts of motion in a variety of ways and the end result is a fairly creative game in the genre.

As some potential players may not have even been alive back when the original Rocket Knight games were released, a quick overview of this game’s flow is in order. Taking place over roughly a dozen stages, players guide Sparkster through a series of side-scrolling stages where you jump from platform to platform, fighting enemies along the way. Some stages change this up by having you fly through a side-scrolling (auto-scrolling) shooting stage, and a few others feature you confronting a boss of varying size and ability, but they all share some basic concepts. Each level can be completed in about four to ten minutes on an initial run, though the game explicitly encourages speed-run and score attack play; it’s probably quite possible to beat these stages even faster once you know their layouts.

What makes Rocket Knight unusual from most 2D platformers is the jet pack; while running, jumping, and using your sword are all obvious enough, the jet pack is far more interesting. You can make sharp, sudden moves with it and these are often necessary to avoid damage, chase certain enemies, and even spring from wall to wall in order to reach your destination. Far from a gimmick, mastering the jet pack’s multiple uses will be an essential skill in beating this game and it does a lot to keep things enjoyable.

The controls deserve special mention, as they’re nearly perfect. Sparkster is very responsive to your input and his movements are quite natural to the player, such that the only real learning curve comes from some of the more complex uses for his jet pack and even those will quickly become familiar. There were very few times I felt a lost life or damage taken were the fault of the game and its controls, and the developers deserve credit for this.

There are a few special features, though they’re rather basic and mostly revolve around online leaderboards ranking you on how quickly you can complete an ’arcade play-through’ (going through the entire game in a set amount of lives), or a ’free play’ where you pick a single stage. Some players have already posted impressive times within just a day of release, though how interesting this sort of competition may be could easily vary from person to person.

Rocket Knight set out to be a good old-school 2D platformer, and it definitely succeeds. Aside from rather bland music, its only real issue is the price relative to how much game play you get; it costs $15/1200 MS Points, but can reasonably be beaten in a little over an hour. That’s comparable to Konami’s various ’Rebirth’ titles and Capcom’s Mega Man 10, but those titles cost about $10... and once you get into the $15/1200 Point range Rocket Knight is going head to head with XBLA titles that offer much more content. This is the only serious issue the game has however, so it isn’t a deal-breaker.

With all those factors in mind, is it worth your money? I think it will be for most people, as I was entertained throughout and am very glad I played this game. But if you’re in a situation where you have to make every gaming dollar last as long as possible, I will admit Rocket Knight’s price point is a sore spot... honestly the only serious one it has. It’s short, but definitely enjoyable and I think most people would do well to give it a try.