XBLIG Review: Rainbow Rapture
“What Would Have Been a Fantastic Mobile App is a Little Awkward on the Full 360″
An XboxHornet review by Liam Jugler.
Welcome back everyone, have a nice holidays? Great, settle in, we have a good game for you here!
Ok, Rainbow Rapture (available separately on XBLIG and Windows Mobile 7) is kind of an iPad feeling thing where you play a cloud, being powered by a rainbow, laying waste to humans below. You do this by dive bombing up and down paths on the ground, attempting to throw yourself into the sky and get more air. Already this game sounds like me explaining a dream to someone, cripes.
Sound-wise, it could be better, the music is all simple and super barebones. It fits the theme, just about, but a little extra work would have been really great. On this note, some better sound effects would have been nice. The mechanic of hurling yourself into the sky is pretty touchy and hard to grasp and some really good musical cues can help this. Just look to the masters of these little mini-games, Popcap, for some examples.
Graphics are a nice change from the massively overdone “Pixels Freakin Everywhere Man” style that is popular these days. Smooth cartoony, bright, happy visuals make it a real treat. The only thing I’d like to suggest here is some more detailing on the backgrounds and “ground” as well as the humans.
Before I move onto how this thing plays, I do want to say I love one thing about the game. As you play along this bright colourful world, most games probably wouldn’t acknowledge how utterly horrible it is that you’re functionally killing tons of people, but not Rainbow Rapture. Rainbow Rapture has the thoughts and ideas of you, the rainbow, at the top of the screen, lamenting how they let humans ruin the world with their cities, calling out for the end of man and in general acting like a totally bananas awoken God. And it’s great. He juxtaposition of these really simple, pretty colours and the constant ranting of a primal God beast destroying the world really kicks a lot of ass. Actually, suggestion again, maybe in the background we could see other cloud-rainbows or other of these primordials wrecking the world with you.
That said, the gameplay of this is, unfortunately, probably the downside of this game. Essentially it boils down to pressing A at the right time to dive into the valleys of the ground while trying to avoid the peaks. If you mess up, you “crash” and your cloud slows down and you start to lose health. This sounds pretty easy but in practice, if you start getting any air it gets harder and harder to properly gauge when to hit the button. The game does also drag a little after a while, I think the devs knew this and threw in heaps and heaps of semi-achievement/challenges to complete as you play. It helps frankly.
It’s a good game for what it is, a small app-style game that can be a fair way to waste a couple minutes while waiting for something. Actually its massive downside is that it’s on the Xbox and not the iPhone or something, this is basically what the devs have made here.
Game Score: 8/10.
Download a free demo of the game here.
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