Rodea the Sky Soldier (Wii U) Review

Rodea the Sky Soldier is a game I knew nothing about. It’s a game with a rather colourful if not troubled history that never stepped on my radar. It’s a game that probably would have been better off abandoned or rush-released rather than forcefully ported up to the next generation of consoles. It’s a bizarre thing to write in this day and age – but in a bizarre example of Occam’s Razor, Rodea the Sky Soldier doesn’t stand up to standards today, where it would’ve back in the Wii’s heyday. Unfortunately this means that the opposite is true too.

Before we go on it’s important to stress a few things. Rodea the Sky Soldier had a really troubled past. It began development on the Wii, was postponed for several years, more or less sat finished and then was eventually rushed on to the Wii U and finally released this year. As some kind of gesture of good will (and honestly what feels more like regret), the publishers have included both the motion enabled Wii version and the new Wii U version in the retail package. Why do people care about Rodea? Possibly because it’s from the mind of Yuji Naka, the man who brought us Sonic.

Rodea is a robot who guards Princess Cecilia, guarding Guardia from the Emperor Naga and his army who are coming to take over the place. The key of time is a legendary relic that allows

The story itself is rather standard for a game of this tone. It’s hammy, it’s cheesy and it’s incredibly over the top as things progress and the game starts to up its ante. The characters are interesting enough, but some of them border a little too closely on the annoying side of things – so much so that the developers included an option to make said characters less conversational.

Rodea the Sky Soldier plays like an action adventure game with a good dose of aerial combat peppered throughout it’s main story. Each level has a certain objective that usually boils down to collecting a certain amount of objects or defeating a certain enemy. Anyone who has been gaming as long as I have would instantly have alarm bells going off in their heads – and unfortunately it’s true. These levels and their objectives are sorely lacking for variety – the levels all feel too samey and the objectives are rarely changed up enough to be interesting.

When I first read about Rodea the Sky Soldier I thought about how amazing it sounded. A hybrid action adventure game where the combat took place predominantly in the sky. A game that took the homing air attack of the Sonic games, expanded on it, and made what could almost be thought to be the airborne equivalent of the Sonic games. Instead what we get is a slow, plodding aerial mechanic that doesn’t flow at all.

As you’d probably guess based on the game’s title, a lot of the combat and traversal is done through the air – but herein lies a problem – the game just doesn’t feel well balanced enough to facilitate this kind of gameplay. Rodea can fly in the air but how long he remains airborne is dictated by a gauge appearing on screen. The main idea of flying in the game is to remain in the air, while recharging your gauge and completing objectives.

This gauge empties the faster that Rodea moves, which is understandable, but most of the game’s systems seem to want to encourage you to soar through the air “like a bird” but there’s no power-ups or enemies that allow you to sufficiently recharge your gauge while remaining airborne. Much like it’s spiritual predecessor, Rodea is a game that obviously would excel when players create a “flow” to their actions. But Rodea doesn’t give you sufficient tools to do so.

What’s perhaps even more frustrating about Rodea is that the environments themselves are fully 3d locations. You’ll spend a lot of time flying from enemy to collectible to enemy. Run out of energy? Prepare for a long drop to the bottom of the level and the need to start again. Perhaps even more annoying is that since the levels are so visually sparse, it’s hard to tell exactly where you might have fallen of before you start your next trial and error pilgrimage to right your wrongs.

It would be remiss to not mention the secondary attack systems that give Rodea alternative methods to attack like the Gears system or the guns. They’ve got an upgrade system just like Rodea himself to give the illusion of progression, but unfortunately these also feel so slow and cumbersome to use that they’re hardly worth the effort. These secondary abilities are also next to useless in later levels of the game where Rodeas core abilities are relied upon more than anything else.

It’s not just the core design of Rodea that really lets it down, however. The game’s camera system is unruly and most of the game’s rather fantastic boss battles are commonly undermined by the frustration you’ll muster trying to overcome it. Areas with scattered enemies are rarely enjoyable to clear since the precision controls afforded by motion controls are missing in the Wii U version. We gave the 3DS version a quick spin and were mortified to find that there was no second stick support on newer models of the console – instead the game just attempted to auto pilot to disastrous results.

Review concludes below.