Room Escape Artist

Rockets are Super Hard: Relaunch is an asymmetrical communication game by Propulsion Games, available on Steam.

Format

Style of Play:

• Asymmetrical communication game

Who is it For?

• Puzzle lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Fans of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Required Equipment: Computer with internet connection. We also recommend a mouse.

Every player needs to have their own device.

Recommended Team Size: 2-8

Play Time: Each mission is around 3 to 5 minutes for each attempt, which ends up being about 15 minutes per mission. There are 20 missions.

Price: $11.99

Booking: purchase and play at your leisure

Description

One player is the rocket operator, commanding the console of inputs and information galore. The other players have a 100+ page manual (a PDF of the manual or printed out pages) to thumb through to help the operator solve puzzles

Kurtis Rohlf’s Reaction

The creators of Rockets are Super Hard were not lying. It was tough to succeed until I caught up to the learning curve. After I failed to read through the entirety of the 135 page manual, I decided to see how many rockets I blew up before the process went well.

The first hurdle was realizing I needed a mouse to play Rockets are Super Hard. You have to right click and drag with the mouse to pan around the control terminal. I would have saved myself much heartache if I hadn’t been so stubborn with using only my laptop trackpad.

After many explosions, I triumphed and launched a rocket into orbit. Huzzah! Playing more levels taught me to prepare before starting. I didn’t need to memorize or be familiar with the full manual, I just needed to pull out the correct pages that corresponded to the next mission and read over and understand those pages before starting. By the third level we were able to successfully complete the mission the first time.

While playing Rockets are Super Hard, I noticed when certain modules are included as part of the mission, they were buggy. Some wouldn’t accept inputs to get a correct output, and in other cases when correct answers were provided based on the visuals, they noted a different answer on the fail sheet. We’ve had issues with Orbit: Binary and Debug: Config. Also, sometimes the manual isn’t correct when telling you what puzzles to pull out for the mission or target altitude for the mission.

I had a blast (pun intended) playing Rockets are Super Hard. It is a challenging exercise in digesting information and communicating quickly, but also rewards preparation before the mission starts.

Theresa Piazza’s Reaction

Rockets are Super Hard is a take on the Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes-style of game where you and your team are trying to launch a rocket with one person manipulating a game interface, and the rest of the team providing instruction by following along a specific set of pdf instructions. While I appreciate the effort to put out a new game in this genre, this didn’t really land for me. The biggest opportunity here is the onboarding, where it’s really difficult, especially at first, to understand exactly what series of actions or inactions caused your attempt to fail. If you love Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Rockets are Super Hard is worth picking up to try, but if you’re new to this style of game, I’d have to recommend starting with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes first!

Theresa W’s Reaction

I never thought a game’s name would be so accurate, but they’re right: rockets ARE super hard! Rockets Are Super hard is a game that truly scales to a large team, with a progressive difficulty ramp that feels good. Our team absolutely loved the puzzles and varied mechanics throughout the levels. Each mission took us a while to get used to, but the manual was clear and concise while being difficult (intentionally) to navigate.

One of the conundrums we ran into is that while each mission got more difficult, the early missions were better with less players and the later missions were nearly impossible with a smaller team. Getting multiple small groups spun up and used to the mechanics early to tackle the harder missions seemed like the way to go, but it was less fun with either a larger team at the beginning or an inexperienced team at the end.

We would have loved to see options to change the player count for later missions so the timer was extended a bit, and see the game scale to shorter time-frames if the team was large enough to support the chaos.

Overall, Rockets are Super Hard was a great time for us, both in-person couch co-op style and over Discord!

Disclosure: Propulsion Games – Rockets Are Super Hard: Relaunch [Hivemind Review] provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.